Ease the Tension is a solo exhibition by the Trinidad-born, London based artist Lisa-Marie Harris, where Trinidad Carnival exists as cultural affirmation, and the bodies within as agents of provocation, release, and autonomy.

The works in Ease the Tension are developed from a sculptural performance mounted in 2024 during Harris’ first return to Trinidad Carnival since migrating many years ago. The one-day durational, winged performance work integrated traditional Trinbagonian bélé movement and wire bending techniques with the abstraction and the materiality of her practice.

The work was activated in Port-of-Spain on the Queens Park Savannah stage during the Mas presentation, Take Flight, created by the designer Valmiki Maharaj for the carnival band, Lost Tribe. Titled, Re: Egret, the performance was situated as a minimalist embodiment of the physical joy and release at the heart of carnival, set in stark contrast to what has become a colourfully extravagant spectacle that dazzles and delights, but often obscures the core purpose of what Carnival is - and can be - for the body.

The performance work is presented in Ease the Tension as a moving image piece along with a soundscape, as a paean to that bodily release. Beyond its start as an act of plantocracy rebellion, and apart from the modern day focus on debauchery, Trinidad Carnival is a cultural coping mechanism.

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“Legs splayed; knees bent. Hands on head. Rear to the air.

Trinidad Carnival seems to begin and end with a frenetic set of waistline instructions, commanding the listener to move. It is simple enough. The music says to do it, and tens of thousands of bodies - dark-skinned, yes, but also light-skinned, sapodilla brown-skinned, mix-up skinned, and every other kind of skin - take over the streets of Port-of-Spain, Sangre Grande, Point Fortin, San Fernando, and all the places in between, to frolic together.

And of the many bodies, those seen as female massively dominate the space. Partly, because we like it ‘jus so’, but also because upon entering the carnival space, no sanctioning of the female body and its movement will be tolerated. We wonder if Trinidad Carnival could even exist without the first women in the first barracks-yard instigating revolt and pushing their enslaved African kin to take cutlass and flambeaux from the plantations and cane fields to start the Canboulay riots that began the very first carnival of the streets.

As those folks sang the lavways that were turned into calypso, as those songs were set to the beat of tamboo-bamboo drums, and as the ping-pong gave way to the steel pan that played the earliest forms of soca, each one in turn declared a refrain that was eventually made clear in a 90s era hit tune: Carnival is Woman. True, not so?

Wine, and Jam. Jump, and Wave. Bend over, and back it up. Go down low. And stay down so. Gyrate Levitate. Oscillate.

Each of the works in Ease the Tension take their cue from such instructions. The pieces - sinewy, taut, and undulating in steel and leather - seek not to represent those bodies, but to permanently release that inner, autonomous compulsion to move for one’s own pleasure. How precisely does one gyrate, levitate, and oscillate? Every Caribbean carnival body - every female carnival body - knows exactly how to do any one of those edicts with an exquisite precision that resonates deep within, reverberating across the collective. And no reasons are needed to validate such things, no permissions asked. It is simple. And it is complicated.

Because it is not the music, per-se that the body follows. The female body at carnival grinds, shakes ‘it’, and stampedes through the streets because the body feels, and in the carnival space, feeling can be done. There is no valence here: no measure of what kind of embodiment has an inherent worth of being good or bad. And there is no one who, in that carnival space, can instruct you on the proper way to feel, or to move. Or to be.

Every raw, jagged thing repressed and thusly recorded in the body - whatever strife, social repressions, gender injustice, historical trauma, or countless acts of self abnegation - compels it to move. And carnival is where that movement is done. In freedom, in revolt, in celebration, in defiance, in solidarity, in all of those grave and important things, for sure. But primarily, the movement is done because carnival is a rubric through which tensions are eased, and a pleasurable, explosive abandonment is felt in the most unadulterated, evanescent and tragically poignant of ways. Those beyond the culture for whom the carnival space feels threatening and perverse, woe be to them. They would prefer you pay to receive some kind of vague and distant ‘somatic release,’ or hot yoga taught by anyone other than an actual Indian yogi, or a membership plan for a suite of supplements extracted from a far flung ecosystem to uncoil the multitude of wrongs inflicted upon the modern-day Westernised body.

Island people convene to publicly witness each other’s release, and to commemorate our collective answer to that inner call because we know it is fleeting and urgent; what is carnival, if not a barebones dream-of-a-dream of physical freedoms? It is where we remember; we remind ourselves that thinking through movement is omnipotent and sacred and valid. If only as a respite from everything else that is wrong, and cruel, and contrarian, and vicious, and repressive about the world that female bodies have always existed within. Every carnival wine is an affront to the forces that would delight in controlling such things in private, whilst denigrating it in public.

We remind each other that this particular, joint movement is how we can freely exist in ourselves, in a synchronous, harmonising activation. We appreciate how everything, from the skimpiest of costumes to the most urgent of gyrations, is stripped down to the wiry, raw nerves beyond the sinews and curves of the flesh. And in the movement - in the body - we express gratitude for the joys of a sweet release that is denied beyond that fleeting moment”.

- Lisa-Marie Harris