Art capital of the world

This year’s carnival and theatre spectacles are special for me as my niece is the driver of Mahogany’s success and my nephew is on stage for most of the sold-out performances of In the Heights, which has toured the USA, Philippines, Panama, Brazil, Japan, Australia, Canada, South Korea and Peru, having started off-Broadway in 2007, moving to Broadway for three years and earning tens of millions of US dollars. Now, its London staging has been extended for a third time.

It is a simple story of an immigrant community of mainly Dominican- Americans in Washington Heights, New York. I sat wondering why it could not come to TT with a local cast and designers? I believe much can be gained by working with international partners where skills transfer almost imperceptibly.

I would like to see much more of that happening over the next few years in our theatres as it also brings the possibility of a shop window for our talent.

We have a comparatively active theatre scene in TT but I would appreciate more diversity in the offerings. The Raymond Choo Kong farces are always fun but we need to bring the subject matter of our serious theatre up to date with the realities of contemporary life in TT.

Mary Can’t Dance by Richard Ragoobarsingh is a small masterpiece in that particular regard that may have — it certainly could have — travelled very successfully.

Three Canal shows come closest to the sort of electricity experienced by the In the Heights audience, but we are capable of almost anything I have seen in London or NY theatres in recent times if we had dedicated resources, more experienced directors, better scriptwriting skills and more chances for our actors to stretch themselves.

As for the visual arts, London is replete with galleries, museums — some of them such as the Victoria and Albert actually own pieces by Trinidadian artist Barbie Jardine — and works of art in public spaces, almost at every turn in Central London.

At the Tate Modern on the south bank of the river Thames, converted from a massive old power plant, I saw an exhibition by an artist hardly known in Britain but revered in the USA as a foundational figure in the history of US modernism. Georgia O’Keefe died age 98 in 1986; her first show was in 1916 in NY. The work however is fresh and exciting.

Seeking to dispel the idea that any eroticism was merely down to her being female, she added cubist-inspired abstractions to her portfolio that later included large, bright, close-ups of flowers (very erotic) and sublime New York cityscapes and landscapes of New Mexico’s deserts in oils, watercolours and charcoals. London audiences are loving it.

Later, surrounded by hordes of culture vultures on a balcony of the Tate Modern, I became entranced by an affectingly simple, large, illuminated cube (by a South Korean artist) anchored on the Thames as part of a festival celebrating the river through art, while swirling, fiery images on the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral recalled the Great Fire of London.

Springing from the still warwrecked city I knew as a teenager into the art capital of the world, expanding endlessly in every direction is not just down to government but to private enterprise, financiers, planners and individuals having a vision of the future. For them art has to be at its heart, something we in TT still have to learn.