Contingents for CARIFESTA IX
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Anguilla |
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Grenada |
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Antigua & Barbuda |
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Guyana |
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Bahamas |
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Jamaica |
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Barbados |
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Montserrat |
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Belize |
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Netherland Antilles:
Curacao |
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British Virgin Islands |
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St. Lucia |
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Cayman |
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St. Kitts/Nevis |
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Cuba |
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Suriname |
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Dominica |
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Trinidad And Tobago |
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French
Guiana |
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(CARICOM Secretariat, Turkeyen, Greater Georgetown, Guyana) The countries and peoples of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) were recently celebrated in Cuba as part of its Twenty-Sixth Caribbean Festival, Feast of Fire held 3-9 July in the city of Santiago de Cuba.
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(CARICOM Secretariat, Turkeyen, Greater Georgetown, Guyana) Under the theme Celebrating our People: Contesting the World Stage, a new model for the staging of the Ninth Caribbean Festival of Arts (CARIFESTA 1X) was unveiled on Monday 12 June in Trinidad and Tobago, host country of the largest cultural festival of the Caribbean.
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A Taste of CARIFESTA
by Gillian Moore, The Trinidad Guardian
Sat 15, Apr
At Tuesday’s night launch of CARIFESTA IX, the Hilton’s poolside took on a real Carnival atmosphere. Guests got just a taste of what can be expected from the festival, which will be held in Trinidad from late September to early October this year.
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Look Beneath The Surface
by Gillian Moore, The Trinidad Guardian
Sat 15, Apr
MOKO JUMBIES, fire eaters, jab molasies and midnight robbers were just a few of the mas characters that showed up at the Hilton Poolside on Tuesday evening, to usher in CARIFESTA IX.
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CARIFESTA Returns to T&T
by Peter Ray Blood
Fri 14, Apr
On the topic of opening our arms to the world, T&T will host the third edition of CARIFESTA in less than 15 years with the staging of CARIFESTA IX here from the end of September.
[ more ]
The CARIFESTA IX Theme:
CELEBRATING OUR PEOPLE: CONTESTING THE WORLD STAGE
This is people taller than cathedrals; this is people more beautiful than avenues with trees.
Earl Lovelace: The Dragon Can.t Dance
The sovereignty of a literature cannot be guaranteed by the excellence of individual works of the imagination or the ingenuity of discourse between writers and critics. The sovereignty of a literature depends on the possession of the text by the total society over the most varied terrain of mediation. The text has to become familiar and an ordinary part of daily conversation. Books stay alive only when they are talked about in a variety of situations by people who recognise that the book is talking about them and may have originated with them. This is all that is meant by the term “classic” in reference to any national literature.
George Lamming: Coming Coming Home, Conversations 11
The people of the Caribbean region share a common history: one that is marked by a resistance struggle that has not only opposed, even defied, the dehumanising systems of enslavement, indenture and colonialism but that has mandated us to realise a more fruitful way of human relating than that instituted and cultivated by those systems. Our arts have been in the forefront of both the resistance to the imposed order and the envisioning of a new human world.
Any new vision of CARIFESTA must see it as a festival that (1) showcases Caribbean art and culture (2) gives impetus for development of the arts (3) facilitate and encourage artistic and intellectual exchanges within the region, as well as (4) benefit countries in the region in relation to trade and tourism.
CARIFESTA seizes the opportunity to establish balance in the arts of the region, between the intellectual/imaginative /contemplative and the purely entertaining, and to reclaim, from what we may describe as the culture of bacchanal, arts which have been very much part of the resistance paradigm on which Caribbean civilization has been seeking to establish itself and which provides the only basis on which Caribbean society can lay claim to an independent and unique culture.
CARIFESTA is aware that the idea of resistance as delinquency, developed in colonialism and embedded in its systems of education, justice, rewards and punishment, has never completely left our thinking and that all of what we now term folk arts and religion - Orisha, Shouters, dance, songs, the drum, steelband and the people who have created and maintained them - have been forced to establish their validity in opposition to official society’s opprobrium. This denial of status has made it easy for us to mistakenly interpret forms as well as people developed in these circumstances as part of a bacchanal culture.
Today we applaud the increasing efforts of artists and intellectuals to understand and value these forms, developed in the struggle for personhood, and to position them as part of the true heritage of all Caribbean people.
Against this background, CARIFESTA seeks to give unconditional acceptance of our people and to honour and celebrate the monumental contribution they have made in art and culture
It seeks also to make us more urgently aware that our experience and genius require that we enter the world not as spectators but as active participants in the contest of ideas that is deciding our present well being and the future of the world.
