If it weren’t for CARIFESTA, we would have never met Henk, nor would we have been exposed to his passion and his eloquence on the subject of the role of the arts in Caribbean society.

Most of the reports are in Dutch, so it’s hard to get specific information on his passing. However, he suffered a stroke in a few years ago, and when I met him again in Guyana (I first met him in Trinidad in 2004) it was clear that he was not well.

Henk was one of the architects of the New CARIFESTA Festival model (a model our country seems determined to reject). He will be remembered for its success when at last it is tested for real. He died too soon; he was only 61.

Walk good, Henk.

Queen’s College, Georgetown

QC Auditorium from the outside

Queen’s College, we were told, is the second best school in Guyana, the best being the Anna Regina Multilateral School in Essequibo.  The thing is, though (we were told) Queen’s College attracts the best students, because it’s a day school, it’s in Georgetown, and children can live with their parents.  Anna Regina is a boarding school and is up the Atlantic Coast at the mouth of the Essequibo River.  That being said, Queen’s College has an auditorium with a lot of seating capacity and a great big stage.  As a result, the QC Auditorium was the main staging site for The Children’s Teeth in Georgetown.

A view of the sound equipment, at the back of the hall, with a bit of the hall included

When we arrived there, we had to build the set.  It was raining that morning, pouring down, and the auditorium has a tin roof that leaks sometimes.  We got there, picked our way through the mud outside, and began working on the set.  The stage was big, bigger than the Dundas stage, but had no backstage or dressing rooms.  Someone had set up a tent outside (shades of the Centre for the Performing Arts) for a backstage, but the rain had battered that to the earth and the ground underneath it was soggy and impossible to use.  So Philip and Terrance set about creating a backstage using the set itself.

A view of the stage before the set was built

The first thing they did was reassemble the set.  It made it, having been rescued from the container and having been sent on the cargo plane, and Terrance and Philip and I arrived at QC at 8:00 (a.m.) to begin building it.  The morning was wet — underwater, I said on Blogworld — with intermittent heavy rain.  The roof of the auditorium is corrugated iron, so that when the rain fell heavily it was deafening, so as Philip built the set he muttered that if it rained that night the show would not go on.  A little rain wouldn’t hurt — the play takes place in August rainstorms, and the roof of the house in question is leaking — but a lot would make it impossible for the actors to be heard.  

Below are shots of the set being assembled.

Terrance putting the house together, with the auditorium in the background

Philip and Terrance put the walls together

The rain stopped by mid-morning, leaving mud and a soggy ground behind.  Georgetown, I learned later, is below sea level, and is surrounded by rivers — the Demerara to the west and the Berbice to the east.  Its fertility — so good for growing sugar cane, hence the rum and the Demerara Gold sugar (the real thing is so much better than the fake, reprocessed, molasses-infused variety) — comes from being on a river delta (New Orleans comes to mind) but the ground is boggy, and water is never very far away.  Every parcel of land is surrounded by ditches, drainage to keep the land dry and the water where it’s wanted.  Even the auditorium at QC is surrounded by a drainage gutter, which would be fine if the rain hadn’t fallen all day long.

View of the grounds through the stage door

The set was finished by midday, when the sun came out and shone weakly — thankfully, otherwise the hall would get too hot — and I went out and picked up a quick lunch for myself and the set builders.  The cast arrived at 2 for their first rehearsal on the set.  The afternoon heated up, but the rain held off, and the run-through took place in steamy heat.  The technicians arrived around 2 as well, and set up the lighting system — two trees with two lights each, and a spot high up on each side platform, run by a lights-up-lights-down board (fading was possible but caused feedback with the sound system, so was used sparingly) — and the sound system — a CD player, a mixer, and a couple of free-standing speakers.  I ran the lights from the script in the computer, and didn’t actually run them until the evening came.

Running the lights from the computer script

There were no dressing rooms, only a bathroom that was part of the school and auditorium complex, and while there was decent water pressure earlier in the day, it faded in the evening to a mere trickle that dripped onto fingers and took forever to refill toilet tanks.

But the audience came out nevertheless.  The night was hot, and Derek Walcott was speaking elsewhere, and we were in a high school auditorium, but the Guyanese people came out to the play.  And the hall was so live that it was hard to understand what people said — especially those people whose voices are already big, like Kennedy or who are so very natural on stage that all their words slurred into one another by the echo, like Leah and Dion — but the people came out to the play, and they got it.  And the next night, even more people came, and were moved, some of them, to tears by the play.  Guyana TV filmed it and replayed it during CARIFESTA, and the producer interviewed us as well.

 All in all?  The experience was an excellent one.

Anyway, watch this space.

Those of us in the cultural world know we have a LOT of work to do.  We haven’t got a decent theatre in the capital that is easy or affordable for Bahamians to use.  The Dundas needs plenty of work; the Centre for the Performing Arts is still a glorified cinema; and the Rainforest appears to be reserved for the work of fourth-rate Las Vegas-style shows.  If we’re going to begin to host the Festival, we have to get some spaces ready that we won’t be ashamed to share with our visitors.

Forget our visitors.  We need to get some spaces ready that we ourselves won’t be ashamed of.

The Festival Series kicks off with a visit from the Morgan State University Choir.  There’s a weekend of performances planned for February 2-4; keep your eyes peeled and your ears open.

As we know more, we’ll post it here.

Tonight, last night and the night before, The Bahamas was featured high on the calendar of events in CARIFESTA. Sadly, though, the international audience was scant; in most cases, we played largely to Bahamians in Trinidad. Not completely, but largely. While this was disappointing to some of the headliners, in particular, nevertheless people got to perform. And as has been the case throughout our stay here, the performances were top-notch.

Here was the line-up of Bahamian performances. The first weekend saw a group of 25 Junkanoo performers in Tobago, and a group of 50-plus singers, dancers and rake and scrape performers in San Fernando in the south of Trinidad.

Junkanoo in Tobago

Monday featured Ophie and the Webbsites, the rake-and-scrape group in the Grand Market, at the Rum Shop stage — a fine venue for acoustic and small-amp performers.

Ophie and the Webbsites in the Rum Shop…

…joined by Ancient Man.

Tuesday brought a rush-out in the Grand Market, which stopped all activities and electrified the people there.

Vola and Gayay carry the banner

And the crowd follows the rush!

Wednesday night saw a gospel performance involving the large band, the singers, and the sacred music headliners (mostly Sonovia Pierre and Simeon Outten).

The Choir

Freeport’s Simeon Outten stirs the crowd up

More Outten

Sonovia lights a spark

Thursday and Friday brought double features, with a choir-and-dance performance at the Queen’s Hall in Port of Spain and a performance of Horse in San Fernando on Thursday, and another performance of Horse and the Country Night Show (a variety show featuring dance, spoken word, choral music, and headline performances). Tonight we wrap up with an all-Bahamian music night on the Main Stage at the Grand Market.

It’s been a learning experience. We’ve been taking notes. This is the first incarnation of the New CARIFESTA Model, and has had many hiccups and challenges. The main challenges with which we’ve been faced have been the marketing and scheduling of events. The two are connected, of course. A schedule that is too flexible and open to change is impossible to market, with the result that audiences miss important performances and shows are cancelled or changed at the last minute. The writers, for instance, were frustrated for a long time with disappearing events and empty venues, and the contingent as a whole has never been exposed to the writers’ work — a definite challenge. The other issue was the fact that the mingling of artists from around the region was limited. This CARIFESTA was spread out all over Trinidad and Tobago, and may have been spread too thin — contingents were scheduled to be in widely disparate venues and rarely had the opportunity for networking and exchange. This difficulty was addressed in large measure by the opening of the Artists’ Village in St. Ann’s — a fabulous space — but some important opportunities were missed.

Festival Village, where the artists hang out

The rehearsal stage at Festival Village — in the beginning one of the best-kept secrets of CARIFESTA!

Still, the new CARIFESTA model has been launched, and will grow. We can only be grateful to Trinidad and Tobago for biting the bullet and taking the risk of the new festival on, and The Bahamas will have to build on the successes — the Artist’s Village was the greatest of these, I think — and learn from the mistakes for 2008. We’ve got one performance and the Closing Gala to go, and then it’s home again.

And we did get a nice Friday shake-up — for many of us, the biggest earthquake we’ve ever felt (and since The Bahamas isn’t in any earthquake zone at all, most of us had no experience at all with trembling earth)! So there.

Numbers were performed by the Choir, Ophie and the Websites, a Rake ‘N’ Scrape group out of Cat Island, the National Dance Company and by two of the winners of the National Arts Festival earlier this year. Performances where also by local artist as they celebrated three of their community leaders.

The trip turned into an all day affair as the group travelled in four busses (22 seat Maxi Taxis) to San Fernando leaving the hotels at 7:30 am and returning at around 9:30 p.m. Meanwhile, another twenty-five members of the contingent travelled to Tobago to put on a Junkanoo rush for the opening of Carifesta there.

Local community members perform.

Skinner Park at night. The Bahamas contingent is about to perform.

Ophie of Ophie and the Websites, Rake ‘N’ Scrape out of Cat Island.

Dicey Doh Singers perform Dry Bones.

National Dance Company with their rendition of Belinda O!

Tex teaches some Trinidadians how to mash the roach.

I wonder. Is it coincidence that at the same time the Bahamian contingent is here, T&T are feeling some of their strongest earthquakes in years?