rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt
Kalypso Revue is hoping Government grants them the same amount of funding they did last year and if possible, more so they can take their Calypso tent to further reaches of the country, sharing the cultural art form with the entire country.
“We are hoping to get the same amount as we did last year,” Marketing Manager of Kalypso Revue, Anne Procope-Garcia told Guardian Media at their audition for Calypsonians at the Kaiso Blues Café in Port- of- Spain.
“Last year they gave us $150,000 and then a following $50,000.” She, however, noted that this amount was a far cry from what they usually received in years gone by.
Annually, for the past 56 years, the Kalypso Revue tent has played a major part in the nation’s Carnival celebrations. Last year, however, the tent met with difficulties in Government funding, forcing them to close.
Asked what they were doing differently to ensure that did not happen this year, founding member of the Revue and nine-time Calypso Monarch Hollis “Chalkdust” Liverpool said: “First of all, we have our audition. Secondly, we might cut some salaries—we trying to pay the important things. We going to have lesser days, we trying our best.”
“Government has to keep the Calypso tent alive. The calypso tent means much more than just singing Calypso,” Liverpool said.
Procope-Garcia said the Revue had also rebranded itself in order to appeal to a wider audience and show a different side of them.
“In the past, we’ve always had the social commentary, political commentary kind of institution. What we have decided is we are putting humour back into it because the people who come to tent, the majority of our audience, really come for the humour and the hard-hitting political commentary and we have softened a little bit on the political commentary side so we’re harnessing all that and bringing it back out in verve,” she explained.
During the auditions yesterday, the audience and fellow calypsonians auditioning got a taste of the humour mixed in with political and social commentary.
The humour side saw a performance by Jeffery Nanton with “Hard Working Man”. His calypso spoke of a man who worked tirelessly all day only to, when he returns home, be “put to work” by his wife.
Another, called “Doh Wash It,” performed by Jah Jah the Mighty Tranquil, was a double entendre.
It spoke about a man telling his girlfriend he loved to eat “saltfish” but not to wash it before feeding it to him.
There were also moving social commentaries such as “Cry of the Affected” by Amrika Mutroo, which took on the perspective of a mother speaking to her elder son who had chosen a life of crime.
She tells him to understand the pain and sacrifices his parents made to raise him, especially his mother. “Understand the pain of the mother,” she sang, “Every time a child is gone, is a mother to mourn.”
