Divas Calypso Tent manager Rudolph Ottley was the first tent manager to publicly lament the private sector’s lack of interest in supporting calypso for the 2023 Carnival season.
Mr Ottley acknowledged general disinterest by the public in attending calypso shows during the season and the significant preference for soca at fetes that will occur every weekend for the next four weeks.
Calypso tents have been on life support for years, with much of the funding that keeps them going coming directly from the Government.
But calypso wasn't always in such a fragile condition. Until the 1990s, the dominant musical form in the annual festival was the calypso and the tents that convened the performers and hottest songs were a hot ticket item.
It was calypsonians themselves who created a perfect storm of errors that all but obliterated the calypso tent from Carnival calendar.
Those misjudgements included ejecting a new generation of increasingly popular soca singers from their rosters and conflating race with politics, insulting half their potential audience.
Faced with collapsing audiences, tent managers turned, ill-advisedly, to the state they were expected to cross-examine, missing an opportunity to court the next generation of calypso fans.
This misreading of its role in society has been largely balanced by decades of youth calypso competitions in schools, which have raised more than three generations of young calypso composers and singers who struggle to make sense of the collapsing kaiso empire.
Kaiso House has chosen a new path out of this quagmire of retrograde thinking by recasting its presentation for 2023 as BarackHard! billed as an “alternative hybrid Carnival-theatre-meets-calypso-tent experience.”
If customers aren’t buying, it’s time to revisit what you are selling.
It’s not the first attempt at merging the storytelling and commentary power of calypso with the presentation scope of theatre.
Ellen Camps introduced the form in the 1980s in a series of shows written by popular pierrot grenade Felix Edinborough, which toured Europe after local success.
The rapso group 3canal evolved the form over more than a decade ago of annual presentations which experimented boldly with how to engage audiences in culture with a mix of traditional and modern techniques.
BarackHard!’s creative director, Abeo Jackson, is a veteran of the 3canal show.
The most recent attempt at rejigging the calypso tent, Kurt Allen’s The Barrack Yard Experience, struggled to find an appropriate home for a show that aspired to evoke ancestral place with an appropriate space.
If tent managers face declining audiences and corporate disinterest, they cannot rely only on calls to support local culture, they must meet the challenge of delivering the wit and power of the calypso art form to audiences in ways that are as relevant as the protest yards that birthed it.
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