The Color in Dartmouth's Carnival
VIEWED FROM THE AESTHETIC SIDE, CARNIVAL IS"QUITE POSSIBLY A WORK OF ART"
CHURCHILL P. LATHROP
Chairman of the Department of Art
WE ALL know that winter sports are a major part of Carnival. The competitions are hard, fast and dramatic. All the essentials are present: speed, timing, endurance, daring. We don't just take this for granted. On the contrary, we are acutely aware of it and get a great thrill out of it.
Naturally we appreciate this athletic side of Carnival, and of course, we are very much alive to the social side. Carnival has been defined as "a festival of merriment" and Dartmouth Carnivals have always lived up to the definition. Young and old of both sexes enjoy the show with zest. It has been rumored that we also enjoy the company of one another.
Then there is still another side of Carnival, the side with which this article is particularly concerned, the artistic side. It is by no means unfamiliar to any of us, and yet to point out again some of the happy connections between Carnival and art may be timely and pleasurable.
Pictorial publicity, the visual announcer of Carnival, is such a connection. There are photographs for the metropolitan press, there's a well-printed program with a colorful cover, and particularly, there are the posters. Winter sports posters are mighty attractive things, especially the European ones. In the past, posters have been imported for Carnival, but they were not really Dartmouth posters. This year the Outing Club committee has made a serious effort to get good American posters designed specifically for the Dartmouth Carnival. They have persuaded many amateur and a few professional artists to submit original poster designs to be exhibited at Carnival time in the Carpenter Art Galleries. The art students of Pratt Institute have sent seventy-five designs, many of them first-class examples of contemporary commercial art. The posters are imaginative and dramatic, and there is no doubt that this exhibition will be the pictorial feature of the 1937 Carnival.
Two of the designs submitted, one by Ruth Storck of Pratt, the other by Ted Hunter '38 of Dartmouth, were chosen by the D. O. C. committee for reproduction and distribution to publicize the current festival. Everyone is enthusiastic about them, and nobody appears shocked by the brighter color and bolder design that distinguishes these new Carnival posters from their recent predecessors.
The stage for Carnival is Hanover, and here we are lucky from the start. Nature has given us beautiful hills with tall stands of mighty handsome pine. They make the snow all the more white and attractive. Balch Hill, the Golf Links, the Vale of Tempe, Oak Hill, what more could we ask for a backdrop to Carnival? And in the town our warm red brick looks its very best when set off against lots of newly fallen snow.
To this good beginning we add each vear some very happy and colorful sets: the fraternity flags, the fine shop windows on Main Street, the flood lights, the colored flares, the stage of outdoor evening, the rockets, and the skilled decor of the Players musical show in Webster. Such a feast for the eye cannot fail to play its part in stepping up our sensory reactions to that pitch of excitement and well-being that only Carnival can attain.
How about snow sculpture? Bull's eye! The Dartmouth Winter Carnival produces sculpture of a most creditable order and lots of it. The cooperative way in which this snow sculpture is produced is astounding and exciting, and the end product is rarely, if ever, "arty." The American male is reputed to be oblivious to art, ignorant of design and too lazy to bother with things not immediately practical; yet every year a group of tough minded, well muscled boys from almost every fraternity, dormitory, and even rooming house knit their brows, roll up their sleeves and produce sculpture, real sculpture. Is it a miracle or is talent more natural than the graybeards have admitted? One vote for the latter.
The boys come out of their respective huddles and work like beavers, inventing their own technical processes as they go along. Snow and water, ice in colors or natural, dramatic lighting arrangements (I wish you all could see this phenomenon in process)—and out of the crucible as a result of art, science and industry, there emerges every year a large outdoor exhibition of sculpture. There is sculpture in the round and in relief, every degree of it. Sometimes the work is on a small scale, usually it is life size, occasionally, it is of a colossal order. It ranges from specific representation to the ultra abstract, from the very serious, through the romantic to the sublimity of humor. I once heard a visiting artist say that our snow sculpture was as good as any average group exhibition of professional sculpture. This may be too generous a verdict, but certainly no one will deny that our efforts in snow are a unique and eye-filling part of Carnival, and in their own right a first class show.
A final liason between Carnival and art may be referred to under the heading of costumes and props. The Carnival crowd abandons ordinary every-day clothes. It dresses up in bright colors, in materials of
interesting texture, in costumes of smart and simple design. This apparel not only allows but encourages free and rapid movement. Winter sports costumes are good modern costumes, both practical and stimulating. We all like them and they fit Carnival to a T.
The props of Carnival also give us aesthetic pleasure. I'm thinking of the colored flags in the snow for slalom, the bright admission tags on our jackets, the sports equipment itself. This latter has a sort of functional masculine beauty derived in part from its efficient design, in part from its precision manufacture. Certainly a ski is a beautiful object. There is not only its graceful shape but also the texture and spring of the wood, and the contrast of the wood with the machinedmetal binding. The ski pole is attractive and the tubular skate, even the hockey stick and the puck have merit as clean, simple, useful forms. In other words there is an aesthetic pleasure to be derived from the tools and requisites of outdoor sport which adds to the physical pleasure of the activity itself.
See the show and all its trimmings at Carnival. Enjoy the games and the people; enjoy the posters, the snow sculpture, the costumes, etc. All designed things are thought to have inherent in them some- thing of art. The biggest, boldest and most colorful design of the Hanover year is the Dartmouth Winter Carnival, the whole she-bang, quite possibly a work of art.
WHAT THE WELL-DRESSED CARNIVAL GIRL WILL WEARColorful clothing may be a major reason for the tremendous growth in the popularity ofskiing among the fair sex. (This factor may not be without appeal to the weaker sex.)Items of feminine apparel similar to those shown above are best sellers in metropolitanstores this winter.
SNOW SCULPTURE (above and lower left),sometimes pretentious and in othercases more simple, appears in front ofdormitories and fraternities during Carnival week. The sculpture is always interesting and is the result of planning andhard work by undergraduates who may nototherwise be hailed as artists. ProfessorLathrop describes the attractiveness andfunctional beauty of a ski and ski polesand other winter sports equipment withits high degree of "precision manufacture."The cabin scene on this page illustratesthe stage setting that skiing enjoys. (Designs for skis, pole, and imported knittedwear on opposite page by courtesy of theDartmouth Cooperative Society.)
CARNIVAL QUEEN Showing Ann Hopkins in the parka and skitrousers in which she was dressed whencrowned Queen of the Snows at the Carnival a year ago.
