Forget the already decomposing Napa, say farewell to the Central Bank Auditorium and welcome to the Big Black Box, 33 Murray Street, Woodbrook. Port-of- Spain finally has its own dedicated experimental performing arts space and it's not a hand-me-down from a state ministry mumbling incoherently about "excavating culture" or some corporate PR venture but the manifest vision of Rapso Warriors 3canal. Messrs Wendell Manwarren, Roger Roberts and Stanton Kewley presented the inaugural performance More Love (More Life, More Living) at a venue "in the heart of the Red Light District" older thespians would remember as the rehearsal space of the late Godfrey Sealy, playwright and Aids activist. Manwarren invoked the spirits of both Sealy and 3Canal founding member John Isaacs, when welcoming the first-night audience, either perched on functional black boxes or propped against the walls of a yard, one end of which is now a well-lit functional stage.
The More Love "performance experience" delivered by The Big Love Squad and The Pappyshow Posse, who performed dramatic narratives, danced with all the dynamism we've come to associate with the annual 3Canal Carnival show. They sang as back-up/chorus to the Rapso Warriors, functioned as a people's response to state pappyshow Emancipation and Independence celebrations; critical, creative, compassionate, satirical social commentary, as we all used to know it. Martin Carter's famous poetic indictment of political tyranny, This is the Dark Time my Love ("the festival of guns, the carnival of misery"), was tagged early on to remind us that many of the issues faced by conflicted contemporary T&T society, are indeed global. The show opened with a brief skit setting the tenor for what followed, a head-on, inyour- face deconstruction of life as we know in T&T: a group of youths faced with the dilemma of banditry or self-fulfilment in a society, where the odds are invariably stacked against the stigmatised denizens of such crime hot spots as Laventille. Bling Boy in town, all gold chains and "Wazzup dawg" lyrics was soundly rebuffed by his peers before 3Canal burst onstage to dispel gloom and doom with the wake-up call: "Stop living the life you living." If it sounds trite ("Let me give you some more love, more light...love is infectious, it's easy to spread'), one only has to remember the Beatles' anthem, or the basic Buddhist tenet. But there's far more of the confrontational "punk bois" spirit rather than the laissez-faire hippy style to 3Canal (think The Clash meets Stickman).
A young female member of The Big Love Squad voiced the frustration of "those people" from ghettos across the country, stigmatised by their addresses ("a prominent attorney told me he was hesitant about employing me...was surprised I spoke so well...") before hardhitting songs I Doh Give a Damn (what people say) and This Place Have Too Much Guns, the poignant elegy for a 13-year-old boy, "another victim of a senseless killing," shot on a Morvant basketball court. Another skit took us to the "militarised" zone of Laventille, recalling the 2011 State of Emergency and posing a fundamental issue of civil rights and security our knee-jerk politicians have missed: "You can't be breaking the law to enforce the law." Shifting from the depths of the heights above town to the Holy Mission Tabernacle on Murray Street, the audience was introduced to Pastor Love, aka Marvin Dowridge, whose cameo role stole the spotlight whenever he launched into one of his acrobatic, eyerolling, totally over-the-top camp sermons like Know Your Rights ("Equal rights and justice for everyone regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation, physical ability etc") or Power to the People.
The brief intermission was followed by the Pappyshow Posse's hysterical skit, featuring Cecilia Salazar as a worse-for-wear political leader and her aggressively sycophantic AG, posturing populist style and batting down errant reporters, as they introduced constitutional amendments. This was political picong par excellence ("Stop pissing on the people's heads and calling it rain") and narrowed the show's focus to election time and militant songs like The People Ain't Taking That, Watch Them ("They playing with your mind taking we for imps") and the climactic Mocking Pretender. In the absence of concerted political calypso, More Love addresses a young generation at risk, in modes they can relate to. 3Canal, with their track record for social consciousness and creative experimentation, are enabling and empowering many whom the State fails to reach. As Pastor Love put it: "We're saving lives." Both the show itself and the Big Black Box are signs that amid our generic helplessness and hopelessness, there is hope and a new generation who ain't taking that. Power to the people and hats off to the Big Black Box.