Thoughts in concert
24/02/07 09:56 Filed in: Carnival
Took a few days off to let
the changes of Carnival 2007 sink in. Over the last few days, every
official who presided over this edition of the event has managed to
take unrequested bows for their contribution.
Commissioner of Police Trevor Paul declared it the best ever, Culture Minister Joan Yuille-Williams declared the event a complete success and Keston Nancoo, head of the almost completely neutered National Carnival Commission (its logo removed from most public signage in favour of the Ministry of Culture), bookended the festival with large advertisements full of self-congratulation which genuflected to the "guidance" of the Culture Minister.
I don't think you'll hear a word of complaint from masqueraders, who faced little or no congestion on the roads or from panmen, who were richly rewarded for relocating to San Fernando for the finals of Panorama.
But these big successes, trumpeted from the rooftops by the new commissioners of Carnival, were actually the exception, not the rule.
Money fixed a lot this Carnival. Poor lighting at the Jean Pierre Complex persisted through the preliminaries and semi-finals of the King and Queen competitions, but massive structures laden with lights were in place for Dimanche Gras, even if the mud seeping through hastily plastered concrete was still very much a part of backstage preparations.
Calypsonians had the oddest competition, singing into a vast empty canyon, with the audience on either side, their fans settling for massive projections of the performances in a arena setting of tragic stupidity.
I've written in the recent past about the way money is redefining Carnival.
Now that the event is over and we can see what's being measured as success, it's easy to see that the Carnivals being envisioned in the future will become more self-referential and less customer focused.
Who is this version of Carnival going to be sold to? The role of an audience in so much of what has happened since Carnival Saturday seems to be an afterthought. The people who journeyed up to the roadway in front of the Princes Building Grounds must have done so out of some sense of pilgrimage to the empty mecca a few hundred yards to the north-west, but what they saw funneled through that space was something very different.
Some of it had to do with the media coverage, which was oddly concentrated in a poor recreation of the old venue that sported none of the traditional trappings. Two television stations (CNMG and NCCTV) spent all of Carnival Tuesday there, in defiance of the state-mandated distribution of Carnival along the parade route and the far larger performance space at the Downtown venue at South Quay.
It all comes down to this...
What resulted was an almost continuous jostling of bands at the Savannah venue, particularly in the morning, as press photographers hustled to get their photos early to make early press deadlines.
At one point, a phalanx of cameras spanned the entire road, effectively freezing any forward progress by masqueraders who were all too happy to prance for a firing squad of lenses.
My lasting impression of this year's Carnival is of an event in which the truly big things got done; the destruction of mature trees, the hasty filling of holes on streets along the parade route (now turning to potholed rubble again), the miles of chain-link fence along the street at the Savannah venue. Yet all the detail work was thoroughly cocked up, the things that the real workers of Carnival, unheralded and certainly unnoticed by the "big picture" imagineers would get done.
Little things like realising you can't put calypsonians to sing to empty space, that visual journalists will get the picture, regardless of how fervently you insist on the stupid plan that was worked out on paper and that people want to see bands on "Big Tuesday", not mill around on empty streets.
Commissioner of Police Trevor Paul declared it the best ever, Culture Minister Joan Yuille-Williams declared the event a complete success and Keston Nancoo, head of the almost completely neutered National Carnival Commission (its logo removed from most public signage in favour of the Ministry of Culture), bookended the festival with large advertisements full of self-congratulation which genuflected to the "guidance" of the Culture Minister.
I don't think you'll hear a word of complaint from masqueraders, who faced little or no congestion on the roads or from panmen, who were richly rewarded for relocating to San Fernando for the finals of Panorama.
But these big successes, trumpeted from the rooftops by the new commissioners of Carnival, were actually the exception, not the rule.
Money fixed a lot this Carnival. Poor lighting at the Jean Pierre Complex persisted through the preliminaries and semi-finals of the King and Queen competitions, but massive structures laden with lights were in place for Dimanche Gras, even if the mud seeping through hastily plastered concrete was still very much a part of backstage preparations.
Calypsonians had the oddest competition, singing into a vast empty canyon, with the audience on either side, their fans settling for massive projections of the performances in a arena setting of tragic stupidity.
I've written in the recent past about the way money is redefining Carnival.
Now that the event is over and we can see what's being measured as success, it's easy to see that the Carnivals being envisioned in the future will become more self-referential and less customer focused.
Who is this version of Carnival going to be sold to? The role of an audience in so much of what has happened since Carnival Saturday seems to be an afterthought. The people who journeyed up to the roadway in front of the Princes Building Grounds must have done so out of some sense of pilgrimage to the empty mecca a few hundred yards to the north-west, but what they saw funneled through that space was something very different.
Some of it had to do with the media coverage, which was oddly concentrated in a poor recreation of the old venue that sported none of the traditional trappings. Two television stations (CNMG and NCCTV) spent all of Carnival Tuesday there, in defiance of the state-mandated distribution of Carnival along the parade route and the far larger performance space at the Downtown venue at South Quay.
It all comes down to this...
What resulted was an almost continuous jostling of bands at the Savannah venue, particularly in the morning, as press photographers hustled to get their photos early to make early press deadlines.
At one point, a phalanx of cameras spanned the entire road, effectively freezing any forward progress by masqueraders who were all too happy to prance for a firing squad of lenses.
My lasting impression of this year's Carnival is of an event in which the truly big things got done; the destruction of mature trees, the hasty filling of holes on streets along the parade route (now turning to potholed rubble again), the miles of chain-link fence along the street at the Savannah venue. Yet all the detail work was thoroughly cocked up, the things that the real workers of Carnival, unheralded and certainly unnoticed by the "big picture" imagineers would get done.
Little things like realising you can't put calypsonians to sing to empty space, that visual journalists will get the picture, regardless of how fervently you insist on the stupid plan that was worked out on paper and that people want to see bands on "Big Tuesday", not mill around on empty streets.
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