ABSTRACT
Cannes brûlées (canboulay) as a Black artistic institution in Trinidad and Tobago should be defined as a multimedia symbolic ceremony in which its psychological messages take various forms and are manifested in a variety of artistic behaviors – music-making, poetics, vernacular languages, dramatics, dance, and other acrobatic gestures. Each of these media is anchored in the matrix of the African cultural traditions brought into the Caribbean by migrants mostly from West Africa and can be traced back to specific tribal origins whose cultural traces are still evident in contemporary Black Caribbean society, as in zoomorphic masks like the Cow/Bull dancers, Dragons, Serpents, butterflies, giant spiders, Burrokeet.
