Tag Archives: Ministry of Culture

A large crowd, of which I was a part, attended the celebration of the United Nations’ declaration of 11 August as World Steelband Day, at an event in Times Square, New York last Friday. Under the auspices of the Consulate General of Trinidad and Tobago, New York, the event was …

In July 2021, I wrote: ‘There is now an urgency also to get real about ourselves in light of the nasty, and now what seems a dangerous and emotionally unbalanced feuding between the Government and the Opposition.   ‘The country has descended almost exclusively into the practice of the poisonous …

“[…] The truth is that culture and, moreso, the business of Carnival has lost, both in terms of revenue generation and reputation, over the course of these two missed years. “Our refusal to even so much as  consider hosting a festival this year will only be seen as an opportunity …

“[…] Port-of-Spain has been converted into a huge playground in which 130 carnival bands, varying in size from 50 to 5,000 or more, will parade along a route of about ten kilometres of streets and avenues that were carefully selected to form a complete loop. “[…] One section of the …

‘Covid-19 will force us to re-build our economy,’ I wrote nearly two years ago, in April 2020. ‘We should place our vibrant performing arts at the core of the recovery agenda, not merely with the disproportionate focus on one transitory carnival season, which we may not even have in 2021. …

Our country has been widely shamed internationally by the Trinidad and Tobago Coast Guard’s fatal shooting of an illegal migrant baby.  The use of the label ‘accident’, the premature ducking of responsibility and due process as well as the crude, partisan political exchanges have compounded the shame. For the moment, …

Culture. It’s a fairly amorphous word; difficult to pin down to a simple meaning. Slippery to define, except perhaps by looking at various characteristics that have come to be associated with it. For me, it is essentially the way people live. That is big and broad and open to all …

On behalf of all the angry people that clamoured for this to be exposed, let me lay it out at the outset: The Ministry of Culture needs properly to account for the distribution of tickets for the main stage events of Carifesta, which was ill-considered, unfair and discriminatory. That each …

Some years more than others, the Christmas message of peace on Earth and goodwill to all persons takes on a tone more urgent than the general warmth of the message. This is such a time. There have been over 500 murders for the year, a number of unsolved disappearances, significant …

By the time of publication, Sing de Chorus would have completed eight performances—including a morning show for students at a discounted price. Sing de Chorus is a calypso musical written by Rawle Gibbons. It is the first part of his trilogy of calypso musicals tracing the history of calypso from …

An Open Letter to Culture Minister Nyan Gadsby-Dolly Dear Madam, It’s over, madam. Dimanche Gras is dead. Like the numerous, onerous pretty costumes the Pegasus Fancy Sailor and Tan Tan and Saga Boy relegated into irrelevance, the show is arguably now exposed as a creaking, antediluvian anachronism, not merely moribund …

What a great result from the Panorama semi-finals last Sunday. The two groovy “young boy” songs Year for Love and Hello—subject only to a tie for fourth place with Lightning Flash—ran first, second, third and fourth as played by Renegades, Despers, Phase II and Skiffle respectively. These songs create a …