As the short Carnival season cranks into turbo mode, former Soca and Calypso Monarch Kurt Allen, prepares to introduce the glocal (global and local) audience to an all-inclusive cultural experience, which may well provide the kind of cornerstone and model our much talked of “cultural industries” have singularly failed to deliver so far.
Like all great original ideas The Barrack Yard Tent Experience (BYTE) is simple and obvious: “To introduce the young generation to traditions they didn’t have the opportunity to witness during The Golden Age, when kaiso (and limbo) enjoyed world exposure.” Allen is quick to point out that BYTE is not a Calypso Tent and that “kaiso is not the only aspect of our national culture, although it still receives more funding than expressions like parang, chutney and steelpan.”
The barrack yard of the plantation and early post-Emancipation urban settlement might still hold negative associations for those adherents of progress, intent on destroying all vestiges of the colonial past, the pillage of Greyfriars in town being only the latest example.
But for visionaries like CLR James, the barrack yard (“a fairly big yard, on either side of which run long, low buildings, consisting of anything from four to eighteen rooms, each about twelve feet square.
In these lived the porters, the prostitutes, cartermen, washerwomen, and domestic servants of the city”) represented one of the first loci of Creole culture, as his 1929 short story Triumph demonstrates:
“No longer do the barrack-yarders live the picturesque life of twenty-five years ago. Then, practicing for the Carnival, rival singers, Willie, Jean and Freddie, porter, wharf man or loafer in ordinary life, were for that season ennobled by some such striking sobriquet as the Duke of Normandy or the Lord Invincible…They sang in competition from seven in the evening until far into the early morning, stimulated by the applause of their listeners and the excellence and copiousness of the rum; night after night the stickmen practiced their dangerous and skillful game, the ‘pierrots’, after elaborate preface of complimentary speech, belaboured each other with riding whips; while around the performers the spectators pressed thick and good-humoured until mimic warfare was transformed into real, and stones from ‘the bleach’ flew thick.”
While the traditional Calypso Tent struggles to stay afloat and solvent in the context of the globalized and commercialized Carnival, Allen has dexterously put his finger on the limitations created by assigning a reduced range of indigenous cultural expressions to the brief carnival season. By focusing on the barrack yard as a nexus, “a confluence of culture(s),” a site which birthed and nourished Creole cultural expressions, rather than endorsing official/colonial /bourgeois notions of culture, BYTE will offer locals and visiting foreigners alike an introduction “to the whole range of our cultural expressions” which as any Trini worth his puncheon knows includes food and drink.
So besides the musical input of Calypso Queen Rose, the Prince of Calypso Rudder the First Couple of Soca Carl and Carol Jacobs, Brigo, Trinidad Rio, King of Humorous Calypso Myron B, Chutney King Rikki Jai, Japanese soca singer Ann-G, The Alternative (string) Quartet, patrons will be regaled by the likes of Comedy King Learie Joseph, actresses Cecelia Salazar (in her Gene Miles role) and Rhoma Spencer and graced by the presence of Carib Queen Alicia Jagessar (a nice touch from Allen whose grandparents were Garifuna—or Black Caribs—who migrated here from St Vincent). BYTE will also provide a menu which complements its Creole roots “with everything from a 1940s parlour” and long time staples like Bake and Beef, Oil Down, sada roti, saltfish, milk and mauby, corn, cowheel and oxtail soup.
If BYTE is the first local all-inclusive cultural theatre experience, it is also a welcome project in sustainable development as it includes young performers (calypsonians headed by Helon Francis, nine-year old Jeremiah James, 10-year-old Tyrece Williams, and 12-year-old Reshaun Gordon) and gives students from UWI, UTT and the Arthur Lok Jak School of Business invaluable hands-on participant experience of participation and production. Co-musical directors are the young pannist Adrian Jaikaran and former Roy Cape Allstars musical director Michael Nysus. Allen’s own daughter 21-year-old Chocolate is overall producer, her youth only matched by her production experience since she was 14.
As Allen emphasizes: “BYTE is not a show but an experience incorporating art (set designs by UTT students) music, theatre and food.” Launching during Carnival, in a covered tent erected in the NAPA car park, is an astute business strategy aimed at exposing visitors “to the full range of our cultural expressions”. But the experience is not limited to the carnival season, after which it will close to reopen two weeks later in a different format.
What BYTE proposes is a model smaller islands like St Kitts, which are heavily dependent on tourism, have already successfully developed: a network of indigenous performers capable of delivering throughout the year-whether for cruise ship transients or longer stay visitors, hotels, conferences, or off-island events like Carifesta and Santiago da Cuba’s famous Festival of Fire. By making young people and students an integral part of the project, Allen has shown the kind of vision and action state agencies can only talk about-or envy. Combining cultural and youth development fills the empty brief of “diversification” and more significantly aims at self-sufficiency rather than subsidy.
As an added bonus for those of us who have endured 3am, 4am or even 5am Calypso Tent finales with patrons sleeping away on themselves, BYTE “must close before midnight otherwise ticket money will be refunded.” See you in the NAPA car park.
• BYTE opens on Wednesday January 28 at the NAPA carpark.
