?Let it be said right up front. The work that has been invested in the National Academy of the Performing Arts, constructed on a site rich with a cultural legacy, is a building of which the citizens of Trinidad and Tobago can be proud. The building looks ready to meet the high standards of the work done on Waterfront Plaza, which hosted the Summit of the Americas in a setting which yielded nothing to equivalent accommodations available in so-called First World nations. There continues, however, to be a significant element of confusion between the magnificence of the buildings that are the primary agenda of Udecott and the way the organisation executes the requirements of the State.
Indubitably pumped with the dramatic results of the work done on the Performing Arts Centre and the unequivocal stamp of approval given to the finished structure by Prime Minister Patrick Manning, Calder Hart, the organisation's executive chairman and de facto lightning rod for criticism, was reported to have declared exultantly on Friday: "Udecott is here to stay!" Quite rightly, Hart wants his company to be "judged by the things we do." But it seems that the Udecott doesn't want to acknowledge that his wish means that Udecott should be judged on everything it does, and, of course, the things it fails to do. In the case of Udecott, that means being accountable to the public for the spending of public funds on projects in a far more transparent way than it has been able to manage so far.
It also means that the company should be willing to explain in much greater clarity than it has why it defied the wishes of the Government in attempting to stall the process of bringing the Uff Commission of Enquiry back on stream. At some level, it must be acknowledged that Udecott is an instrument of the State, and must be engaged in the business of executing its works based on the will of the political directorate. That leadership has the final say on its operations, and its thinking and planning process remains hopelessly impenetrable. When the Prime Minister declares the National Academy of the Performing Arts open today, he will be doing so against the backdrop of an otherwise shameful record of performance in the creative arts sector.
The building in which he will be standing will, for all its obvious grandeur, have been constructed with little reference to the working creative community in Trinidad and Tobago, and the final gamble of its construction will, ultimately, be whether the Government's attitude that it knows best finds purchase with the people who will be using the space. Across the street from the former site of the Princess Building, once the home of Lord Kitchener's Revue at Carnival, is the crude space allocated to the national festival since the pointless destruction of the Grand Stand in 2005, a shameful reminder of the lethargy of Government's focus on an event their tourism arm does not hesitate to describe as "the greatest show on Earth."
Just over a mile away in Woodbrook, a building that long ago earned its reputation as a cradle of theatrical creativity, remains in a shambles of partial reconstruction. The Little Carib Theatre, brainchild of the late Beryl McBurnie, and the space where many of Derek Walcott's formative theatrical works were first staged, remains starved for a legacy flag's worth of funding. It is estimated that TT$2 million worth of work remains to be done on the structure, and as we know now, there's no price on national pride. The Trinidad Theatre Workshop, once promised performance space in the Old Fire Station that remains like an old-school wart on the north-eastern corner of the otherwise clean, modern lines of the National Library in Port-of-Spain, struggles along in an old, shaky gingerbread house in Belmont.
Every ground up, entrepreneurial effort to clear ideological space and build theatrical stages in Trinidad and Tobago continues to go abegging, while an ultra-modern, Chinese branded space, built based on consultation with nobody who lives and works here, constructed with materials and labour shipped in for the effort, will be lauded today by our Prime Minister. It is a grand, sparkling effort, one worthy of suitable ceremony, but on Tuesday, it will be up to its new managers, UTT, to begin the business of figuring out who it's for and how they will be able to bring it into meaningful mainstream use.