A Banda (The Band)

“A Banda” is a joyful Brazilian Carnival song by Chico Barque de Hollanda that talks about the cathartic power of witnessing and participating in festive processions. As a child in my small Italian hometown I participated in the carnival parades that celebrate the beginning of the Christian Lent, and I still have fond memories of dressing in costume and being on floats proceeding among cheering crowds through the main street.

When I moved with my wife and first child, Paolo, from Southern California to Oberlin twenty years ago, we had a challenging first year adapting to the new situation. The elementary school that Paolo attended was quite different from the San Diego preschool we had experienced. As the year progressed, I learned that it was a local tradition to organize a ‘carnival and parade’ to celebrate the end of the school year.  As a member of the PTO and artist, I was asked to do something ‘creative’ for that occasion, and I proposed a procession on the school grounds that would engage the children with a big puppet. Specifically, I had in mind to build a puppet based on the Bread and Puppet Theater (based in Glover, VT) dragon with head, tail, wings and claws made of papier mâché, while the rest of the body was simply made by a stretch of painted canvas held up by children with coat hangers on a stick. I recruited the help of two very enthusiastic Oberlin College students, who not only helped with the dragon, but also crafted a large elephant with canvas on wood and chicken wire resting atop two conjoined bicycles. 

The joyous awe of the children witnessing such creative madness inspired us to make the celebration larger, extending the engagement to the other area schools and actually parading through town. One year, we decided to make cardboard masks 150 kids. This gigantic production opened my eyes to the magic that can be done with staples and glue guns, and the next year we started working with recycled cereal boxes, soda can packages, and six-pack containers. Since most of my print-based artwork is monochromatic, matching colors and forms became an obsessive liberating task for me. “The Big Parade” will be celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year and is a staple event in Oberlin.

As we were close to Cleveland, we learned about Robin VanLear’s marvelous “Parade the Circle,” and of course I wanted to participate. It was an honor to have Robin come and see the puppets I made for a short opera in Oberlin, and even a greater honor to be invited to that landmark event that she had created. Under the Parade big tent, I have met and observed in action the truly amazing group of artists that make the magic happen; in particular, I owe a lot to the visionary building skills of the two main engineers Mark Jenks and Ian Petroni, who help me bring crazy construction to life. 

Reviewing these works, the influence of the only art history class I truly loved is evidenced: it was African Art, was taught at Mesa College by the great scholar Barbara Blackmun and made me understand the alchemic power of making masks. I am overjoyed to think that somewhere in the memory of many children there is a moment in which they saw that magic come alive.