JavaScript is disabled in your web browser or browser is too old to support JavaScript. Today almost all web pages contain JavaScript, a scripting programming language that runs on visitor's web browser. It makes web pages functional for specific purposes and if disabled for some reason, the content or the functionality of the web page can be limited or unavailable.

Sunday, July 20, 2025

Thousands chip down The Virtual Road

by

joel julien
1798 days ago
20200816

COVID-19 has caused events all around the world to be can­celled.

But the or­gan­is­ers of the Toron­to Car­ni­val de­cid­ed they were not go­ing to al­low the pan­dem­ic to rain on their pa­rade.

And so the con­cept of The Vir­tu­al Road was born.

The Toron­to Car­ni­val was held on­line this year re­plac­ing the reg­u­lar Grande Pa­rade, Aneesa Oumar­al­ly the chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer at Fes­ti­val Man­age­ment Com­mit­tee the pro­duc­ers of the Toron­to Caribbean Car­ni­val told Guardian Me­dia.

And the event was a suc­cess, at­tract­ing over 100,000 peo­ple on­line Oumar­al­ly said.

Oumar­al­ly who lived in T&T be­fore mi­grat­ing to Cana­da as a teenag­er de­scribes her­self as a “Tri­ni to the bone.”

Both she and her hus­band at­tend­ed sec­ondary schools in Na­pari­ma and have al­ways been ac­tive with the West In­di­an com­mu­ni­ty in Cana­da.

As part of her work for pro­mot­ing Caribbean cul­ture Oumar­al­ly joined the board of di­rec­tors at the Fes­ti­val Man­age­ment Com­mit­tee.

When the for­mer CEO left last May, the board need­ed as­sis­tance in or­gan­is­ing the Toron­to Car­ni­val.

Be­ing the chair of the gov­er­nance com­mit­tee at the time Oumar­al­ly was in­stru­men­tal in the suc­cess­ful host­ing of the event.

Oumar­al­ly was even­tu­al­ly named CEO.

With this be­ing her first Toron­to Car­ni­val, she was look­ing for­ward to the event this year.

But then the COVID pan­dem­ic hit and Toron­to went in­to lock­down.

And so on April 8, the fes­ti­val man­age­ment com­mit­tee an­nounced the can­cel­la­tion of Toron­to Car­ni­val.

“For the past 52 years, the Toron­to Caribbean Car­ni­val (for­mer­ly Carib­ana) has de­liv­ered an ex­cit­ing sum­mer fes­ti­val fea­tur­ing elab­o­rate cos­tumes, Caribbean mu­sic, and food in our Grand Pa­rade. This fes­ti­val is a labour of love cre­at­ed by our ex­tra­or­di­nary tal­ent­ed artis­tic stake­hold­ers, and sup­port­ed by par­tic­i­pants and vol­un­teers,” the or­gan­i­sa­tion stat­ed.

“Tak­ing in­to con­sid­er­a­tion the mass crowds that at­tend the events, it presents a tremen­dous risk re­gard­ing the spread of the virus, it is there­fore unan­i­mous that the pri­or­i­ty must be the health and safe­ty of our pa­trons and hav­ing weighed all these con­sid­er­a­tions there is no choice but to can­cel this year’s fes­ti­val.”

The Grande Pa­rade usu­al­ly at­tracts a mil­lion peo­ple and rais­es around CAD$400,000 in rev­enue.

The com­mit­tee promised that if cir­cum­stances changed and the City of Toron­to al­lowed events af­ter Ju­ly 1, they would find a “non-tra­di­tion­al for­mat”to cel­e­brate.

And so said so done.

Start­ing on Ju­ly 3 they be­gan a month of vir­tu­al events which fea­tured among oth­er things steel­pan and ca­lyp­so.

“We said we had to find an­oth­er way to cel­e­brate,” Oumar­al­ly re­port­ed.

“From start to fin­ish we learned a lot, we learned what was not work­ing dig­i­tal­ly, what peo­ple liked look­ing at what peo­ple didn’t like. Dur­ing this time we al­so formed re­al­ly good part­ner­ships. The On­tario Sci­ence Cen­tre even brought sci­ence to Car­ni­val,”she said.

Dur­ing the Ju­nior Car­ni­val week, On­tario Sci­ence cre­at­ed ex­per­i­ments to show the chil­dren sim­ple as­pects such as  “how ma­te­r­i­al would dance on a speak­er and it would form a pat­tern and they did it to so­ca mu­sic of course,” Oumar­al­ly said.

The Caribbean Tales Film fes­ti­val al­so showed a movie about Pe­ter Min­shall which was played on their King and Queen night.

And on Au­gust 1, the Vir­tu­al Road was held.

“The con­cept of the Vir­tu­al Road is that we were go­ing to en­cour­age every­body across the world to par­tic­i­pate with us in Car­ni­val over Zoom. So Zoom was free it was a free Car­ni­val, all you had to do though was reg­is­ter for your Zoom link,” she said.

And the mas­quer­aders an­swered the call.

The event last­ed 13 hours from 9 am un­til 10 pm.

It trav­elled through Aus­tralia, Japan, the Unit­ed King­dom, and of course T&T. 

DJs and live per­form­ers rep­re­sent­ed each area.

T&T was rep­re­sent­ed by Nailah Black­man, Free­town Col­lec­tive, DJ Ana and Ul­tra Sim­mo.

Every hour a dif­fer­ent coun­try was rep­re­sent­ed with the slo­gan “all roads lead to Toron­to.

“To be hon­est with you I was asked by me­dia here what suc­cess for the event would look like, and I said if we get about 50,000 peo­ple I would be over the moon. We got in ex­cess of 100,000 peo­ple par­ty­ing with us from across the world,” she said.

“We could not ex­pect that peo­ple would be so ex­cit­ed; it was 13 hours of so­ca and they stayed 13 hours,” she said.

The des­ti­na­tion mar­ket­ing or­gan­i­sa­tion for Toron­to’s tourism in­dus­try Des­ti­na­tion Toron­to claimed “Car­ni­val wins” af­ter see­ing the suc­cess of the event, Oumar­al­ly said.

“We got an A in our re­port card for cre­at­ing this en­vi­ron­ment,” she said.

Oumar­al­ly said she was heart­ened to see the ca­ma­raderie and cheer that the event caused.

“We told peo­ple put on some feath­ers, but they were decked out from head to toe in their cos­tumes, boots in­clud­ed ready to go,” Oumar­al­ly said.

“Peo­ple have said we’ve cre­at­ed his­to­ry by putting on this vir­tu­al Car­ni­val and it showed the abil­i­ty of Toron­to Car­ni­val to think quick­ly on our feet and to piv­ot,” she said.

Oumar­al­ly said over­com­ing odds is the em­bod­i­ment of Car­ni­val.

“It feels fan­tas­tic to have done some­thing to cel­e­brate our cul­ture and her­itage and it al­so shows the re­silience of Caribbean peo­ple. Car­ni­val is born out of re­silience and this is just an­oth­er form of re­silience,” she said.

“If you put your mind to some­thing you can make changes and peo­ple recog­nise that we may not be able to do some­thing in the same way we are ac­cus­tomed to do­ing it but we were not afraid to try some­thing new and that is what I learnt, our com­mu­ni­ty was not afraid to try some­thing new, they want­ed the ex­pe­ri­ence of be­ing to­geth­er, they want­ed the ex­pe­ri­ence of com­mu­ni­ty, and they want­ed to have that pride in their her­itage,” Oumar­al­ly said.   


Related articles

Sponsored

Weather

PORT OF SPAIN WEATHER

Sponsored