Caribbean countries to perform in TT for Carifesta

During the past week the different electorial regions have been hosting warm up shows in the lead up to this festival. The various villages registered with the Ministry of Community Development and Culture have been instrumental in putting on various street parades and cultural shows as part of the preparation plans for Carifesta this year.

Under the theme “Celebrating Our People”, Carifesta IX will follow a new format approved by Caricom Heads of Governments in 2004 at the Grenada Conference.

Apart from showcasing the arts, the festival will also seek to encourage artistic and intellectual exchange within the Caribbean Region. The ten-day event features performances by artistes from English, French and Dutch-speaking Caribbean territories and Latin America.

For this year’s event there will be a grand cultural market and trade fair which will focus on local cuisine as well fashions and handicraft and other aspects of the culture. This is the third time Trinidad and Tobago will host, having previously staged it in 1992 and 1995.

According to a note on Carifesta, the idea of resistance as delinquency, developed in colonialism and embedded in its systems of education, justice, rewards and punishment, has never completely left the people’s mind 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.

Carifesta team applauds 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 Caribbean people and to honour and celebrate the monumental contribution they have made in art and culture.

It seeks also to make the people more aware of the experience and genius that allows Caribbean people to enter the world not as spectators but as active participants in the contest of ideas that is deciding the Caribbean’s present well being and the future of the world.

CARIFESTA showcases the cultural richness of the Caribbean people. The main goal being to focus on the indigenous segment of the Caribbean population. In 1992, when Carifesta IV was hosted in Trinidad and Tobago, the twin-island-state gave the Indigenous People attention.

It so happened that it was at the time when the world marked 500 years since Columbus discovered the New World, America.