Senior Reporter
soyini.grey@guardian.co.tt
Both the 2023 King and Queen of Carnival have made it to the semi-final round of this year’s competition next week Wednesday.
Raymond Marks’ Spirit Dance and Priya Nagassar’s Mother Nature—Beauty of Nature, will find themselves having to fend off other former winners as they vie for a spot on the Dimanche Gras stage for this year’s titles.
Ravi Lakhan cut a striking figure in the Fantasy category of the prelims, dressed in silver, outfitted with a flowing white wig at the Queen’s Park Savannah, Port-of-Spain, on Thursday night. He secured 384 points with Zeus—King of Gods, topping the Kings category.
However, he will have to fend off the likes of Ted Eustace, whose Dracotaur (Lord of the Under Seas) received applause as soon as it appeared on the stage. Designed by his brother Markus and created by Ben Gayah, it earned 357 points from the judges.
Joseph Lewis and Fareid Carvalho, former Kings themselves, copped second and third place respectively.
In the Queens category, Dana Rampersad’s Flight of the Monarch Butterfly received 400 points, placing her at the top of the field. In addition to the reigning queen, she will also come up against Shinel Brizal and Peola Marchan in her attempt to secure the crown.
Despite some falls on stage, 48 queens and 43 kings battled for a spot in the top 20 to advance to the semi-finals.
The show began 30 minutes late with a performance by Mical Teja, whose song DNA was a very popular choice throughout the night among the masqueraders. It was closely followed by Nadia Batson’s Market, which inspired Debbie Aguillera-Sammy’s design for Caribbean Market Woman. A relatively new entrant to the competition, her costume collapsed while on stage.
“The wheel gave out,” she explained. “The costume was not balanced so it fell.”
Undeterred, Aguillera-Sammy said she will try again next year for the crown.
Unfortunately, another queen, Alison Emma John with Beauty In D Bachannal: Madame Koskelle, also had a collapse on stage.
A fall, however, is not an automatic disqualification. National Carnival Commission commissioner Roselind Gabriel said had the contestants been able to get back up and carry the costume unaided, they would have still had a competitive chance.
This seemed to be the case with Ronald Taylor’s costume D’ Farmer Ron: The Cream of the Crop. The puppet-style design seemed to become increasingly bent during its short time on stage. It never collapsed fully, and he was at times able to make it appear that the lean was an attempt to make the character use the hoe in its hand to “till the soil”.
The competition was a relatively smooth-flowing affair. There were a few hiccups and the show ended just before 1 am. By then, much of the audience, which was relatively full at the start of the evening, had thinned significantly.
