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I don’t actually mean that we should have a ministry of festivals, in the sense of a state-controlled body—that kind of lumbering oversight has done little to develop anything meaningfully. Not for an entity that has to be agile and innovative and intimate with our history and traditions.
Last year, I heard the masterful events manager Jules Sobion say that this country needs a ministry of festivals and it stuck with me as something worth exploring.
(Copyright Stefan Falke)
I didn’t want to write about it in the Carnival season, mainly because I didn’t want people to mistakenly think I was talking solely about Carnival. I wanted to look at the festivals that abound in this land, in the context of how we can move towards supporting them in a meaningful way throughout the year.
Annually, we have 14 public holidays—most of them affiliated to some sort of festivity, religious and otherwise. Differentiating them hardly matters because we really transform everything into some kind of festival.
Divali, Eid, Christmas, Easter, Phagwa, Hosay, Emancipation, Indian Arrival, Spiritual Shouter Baptist Liberation, Independence and Labour are just some of the days we have transformed into seasons of celebration.
Then there are others on the calendar like Tobago Jazz, Blue Food, Heritage Festival, We Beat Festival, Santa Rosa Festival, and now in the second week of October, we mark the First People’s celebration.
(Courtesy Globe Trotting In The Grio)
If you calculate that even if it is for a day (and it is more often for a season), the preparations for celebrations consume a significant amount of time and energy and focus.
In reality, it is enough to fill a whole year with continuous activity. But we always hear complaints about lack of financial support, no real training in the required skills—not just the artisan aspects but the management and organisational tools to develop.
We have to see this element of our culture as one that can be a viable industry, as many have advocated. Again, the steelband community has led the way here.
Photo: Consulate-general
I don’t want us to mistake the suggestion of structure and training as a way of dropping ourselves into the laps of the slick corporate types who have overrun and massacred the whole concept of mas so that it has barely any survivors now. Oh, no.
I am talking about teaching people our history and the techniques and the latest ideas in the production of high-quality events and creations that use sustainable, homegrown materials and practices to bring everything together so that when you see it, you recognise it as something distinctly ours.
Outside of the characters and costumes of Carnival, if you think about what goes into the construction of a tadjah for Hosay, or a Ravan for Ramleela, and all the various skills needed to produce elaborate costumes, it seems a shame that they all disappear after the event.
Imagine if Trinidad and Tobago could have festivals throughout the year that present combinations of these things.
When I spoke to Jules Sobion to ask him what he’d envisaged when he hollered for a ministry of festivals, one of the things he’d been looking at was creating festivals outside of the existing ones.
Given the area of his expertise as commander-in-chief of his Caesar’s Army company, he was looking at packages like a festival of fetes, or a street food festival, aspects that could be brought together and marketed so that there could be something for everyone in this all-year extravaganza.
He saw himself as a “new-age concierge”—quite an appealing image. It is an interesting idea because it also provides the advantage of being able to be taken outside of the country.
But for the same reason I didn’t want to throw out an idea that was only partially focused on the big picture. I think this should be how the conceptualising can go, but not be restricted to creating fete-oramas.
I was listening to an introspective and engaging interview with Wendell Manwarren on YouTube that was so insightful and rooted that it ought to be heard by anyone trying to engage the Carnival arts.
Photo: Maria Nunes
It was wistful in many ways, but what was particularly striking to me was how he was able to weave his childhood experiences with the history of mas, and how he and 3Canal remained faithful to that core in their music and their mas.
It is my gut feeling that should there be a way to make it happen. Manwarren should lead the movement into this development of our festivals and arts.
I certainly believe that he has the kind of respect for all the forms that have existed from the different realms, to include them—not in the all-inclusive way that has become vulgarly exclusionary. But as beings with equal rights to be seen and heard and celebrated.
Photo: UK Telegraph
Knowing that the world of creative minds is full of characters with diva-sized egos, there will obviously be clashes in such an organisation. But I think that if there is a leader with a record of managing the institution that 3Canal has been, then there will be enough respect to keep it together and to build something meaningful.
I always go back to Frank Worrell because he did that.
It will need state funding, or a combination of private and public sector support, but it needs to have independence and respect for our history at its core.
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My only disagreement will be having any government direct involvement, private organisations, crowd funding and multiple forms of returns on investments can ensure it survives independently and globally recognised. Some of the same participants can have a business in a field which supports a festival, as a requirement e.g. Samaroos has beads in the festivals and also have a traveling team who supplying beads to bands and public.