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Gozo’s Gonzo Gala
An article about the history and ethnography of the medieval-like in Gozo
The carnival in Nadur, Gozo, the best of its kind on the islands, has become so popular that the crowds of spectators on the main night are so thick you have to hold a cigarette above your head to avoid burning the people jostling around you. Meanwhile, the bars are full of people marveling, and dancing to, the tribal gypsy-sounding tunes of the traditional musicians who play an assembly of instruments that includes a brilliant contraption called zavzava. The zavzava is now something of a sensation, and the best player of all, a local man in his fifties, told me: “I get many requests to play in other places. People have been encouraging us to form a professional band.” So far he has resisted: he simply plays at the carnival, the merriest days of the year, something he’s been doing faithfully for thirty years.
Aside from the traditional bands, the carnival in Nadur is fascinating as a celebration that has survived, in spirit if not in costume, in its medieval form as street theatre without central organisation. The dramatic creativity of the street performers is all the more amazing because the performers are traditional townsfolk who put up masterly performances that would make modern-art performers feel envious. Such manifestation was brought to wider attention by a theatre-studies academic, Vicky Cremona, who studied the carnival in the 1990s. Cremona helped spur the popularity of the carnival outside the insularity of Gozo, and then she began to dread the outside spectators because they were imposing their values on an event that had survived anachronistically only because few people outside Gozo knew or cared about it until the nineties. She feared that the carnival’s spirit would be stifled. In a way, the changes she had predicted have come about – there are fewer performances now than ten years ago, and none of the former macabre stuff (such as hens crucified alive, masked participants brandishing sickles, animal intestines and innards or women’s soiled underwear flaunted for gory effect) – but the performances on display remain true to the original spirit.
The original spirit: turning social order and mores on their head in clever and deliberately crude travesties is what the carnival has always been about. It is thought to have originated in France sometime during the Medieval Ages, and spread quickly through the Catholic countries of southern Europe. The primary purpose was the exceptional allowance of three days of debauchery before the advent of the forty days of ascetic self-denial of the Catholic Lent. The authorities – a collusion between the ecclesiastical and monarchic rulers of the time – tolerated these three days because their subjects could vent their frustrations in a fairly contained manner.
Then, the commoners started using the event to ridicule unpopular governance. Their masks, which concealed their identity from the possibility of retribution or disgrace, liberated them, so the event became, according to Cremona, “a mock revolution”. Eventually, the changes in the political landscape of modern times rendered the event obsolete in much of southern Europe, or else transformed it beyond recognition. In Gozo, however, it might have survived as a glimpse of what it was: it’s no accident that the event in Nadur takes place in the narrow alleyways behind the town church, rather than in the town square in front of the church where there is more space.
Year after year the hits of the show (beyond the veneer of modernity – the cheap latex mask imports of devils or monsters or wicked old people) are the deliberately farcical performances. It could be something like a crudely costumed group building a stone wall, or performing an operation on a ‘patient’, or simply thrashing a car with sticks. The best performances are often caricatures that express the vexations that the traditional townsfolk feel towards contemporary political initiatives or social trends. Expect lots of performances ridiculing political correctness, or effigies of unpopular personalities, or even disdainful commentary on big events in the world. Recently, for example, a solo performer crawled along in a costume that was half human and half Coca-Cola dispensing machine (including large paint tin containers for legs) – perhaps a comment on globalisation.
In the past, many performers created travesties of peasantry by parading cows or sheep or chicken, but live animals have now been completely banned. What you see now is more peculiar cross-dressing – very potent in this traditionally macho culture – and more outlandish costumes of hilarious travesties, and sometimes performers sitting on toilets pretending to be doing their business unaware that they are being watched. The event has also grown in different ways in recent years to include a separate spectacle organised by the local council – a parade of colourful floats, dancers, and performances that are also inspired from the unorganised traditional spirit and include doses of hilarities and eccentricities.
The bands meanwhile fill the traditional bars with revellers and merriment. They play tambourines, bongos, wooden instruments, and the obscure indigenous zavzava. The latter is a fascinating instrument made of cat’s skin stretched over a metal bucket, and then attaching one end of a long wooden stick to the cat’s skin. The stick is massaged to create vibrations on the skin, and these vibrations are amplified to produce rhythmic hoomph-hoomphs. It’s a very delicate instrument, and hitting the stick a trifle too hard pierces the skin and ruins the instrument. Indeed, playing zavzava to its potential is a skill that takes years of practice to acquire – and a skill that survived in the carnival in Nadur.
(C) Victor Paul Borg 
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