Fancy Dress Carnival is a multimedia spectacle wherein masked performers don costumes and dance down the street or compete in an arena with accompanying musicians, usually a brass band, delighting Ghanaian audiences (Fig. 1). Fancy Dress is a distinctive form of carnival1 belonging to Ghana with a deep history that stems from both international and local practices. What sets Fancy Dress apart from other African masquerades are the carnivalesque meanings that connect it to other Black Atlantic carnivals. The colorful costumes, characters, and other fancy aspects exhibiting “play” and fierce characters expressing “power” interact with their spectators as a means to negotiate community identity, demonstrating a complicated relationship with Europe and the United States. Fancy Dress is a form of kakaamotobe, an umbrella term for a fierce display through costume, music, and dance found throughout the country.2
The carnival started around the turn of the...