check this article out
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Govt gags Pat Bishop
ARTISTS yesterday expressed deep concern over reports that award-winning musical conductor and Trinity Cross holder Pat Bishop was gagged from speaking at a
National Museum event on Tuesday evening by officials of the Ministry of
Culture, in the wake of critical comments Bishop made over the museum.
Ken Critchlow on Tuesday evening at 6 o’clock. However earlier on in the
day, officials in charge of the exhibition, entitled “Perspectives,
memory and desire”, were given a directive from the ministry that Bishop
was not to be allowed to speak.
http://www.newsday.co.tt/news/0,117492.html
Pat Bishop snubbed
WayneBowman
March 18th 2010
A visibly hurt Leroy Clarke informed guests at Tuesday’s opening of an art exhibition at the National Museum and Art Gallery in Port of Spain musicologist and artist Dr Pat Bishop
had been struck off the guest list.
In fact, Bishop was supposed to be the feature speaker but Clarke spoke instead in his capacity as ’master artist’ in the slot meant for her delivery of remarks on the exhibit entitled ’Perspectives’ featuring
the works of Carlisle Harris, Glenn Roopchand and Kenwyn Critchlow.
Bishop wrote the foreword in the catalogue that was presented to some of the guests as they arrived at the museum for the opening and was therefore the obvious choice of speaker for the ceremony. Guests reacted
with shock, some shaking their heads and steupsing when Clarke made the
announcement.
http://www.trinidadexpress.com/index.pl/nart?id=161609929
Replies
NAPA tragedy
By Andre Bagoo Sunday, March 14 2010
IT COULD TAKE as much as $80 million to correct flaws in the design of the National Academy for the Performing Arts (NAPA), Port-of-Spain, the interim President of the Artists Coalition of Trinidad and Tobago (ACTT) Rubadiri Victor, estimated yesterday.
While Prime Minister Patrick Manning last week praised the NAPA as being “world class,” Victor yesterday begged to differ, saying the facility is plagued with technical problems and argued that it does not compare in any form with Queen’s Hall, St Ann’s.
Discussing a dossier on the NAPA prepared by the ACTT which has been circulating on the internet this month, Victor, a multi-media artist, said, “$80 million is a realistic estimate of the costs that would be involved to correct the defects.”
“It appears as though the firm which built and designed the facility (Shanghai Construction Group) may not have been experienced in building facilities of this kind,” he said.
The ACTT in their dossier, entitled, “The Tragedy and Hidden History of the NAPA”, the coalition of artists also estimate that maintenance of the building like the NAPA, which has an estimated budget of about $500 million, can approach as much as ten per cent of building cost. Architects, though, noted that maintenance costs are difficult to estimate due to the variables involved, such as the quality of original materials used.
Among the defects noted in the ACTT dossier are:
There is no loading area for the main stage;
The stage is “ill-matched” to the 1,500 seating capacity of the hall;
The orchestra pit is defective;
The light and sound boards are analogue and not digital (the industry standard for the last decade);
There are “hundreds of problems with lighting and sound fixtures and equipment” The stage floor is “ribbed and is not a sprung floor so is ill-suited for dancing and thus will damage dancers”.
Dance studios are flawed;
There are “no costume rooms, no set construction rooms and no warehousing rooms”;
One architect not involved in the ACTT report, who has been inside the NAPA yesterday confirmed the flaws identified in the report and added, “the floors are laminated and they have begun to chip already. Because of materials used, there are also creases on the stage, which will be a challenge for dancer.”
“A loading area’s dimensions are normally about 16 feet x 10 feet- NAPA has a normal door! This means that sets, costumes of a certain size, certain musical instruments (hint- one of them is our national one) cannot fit through NAPA’s doors to get backstage!” the report, compiled from a site visit and other sources, notes.
“The two rooms that have been trumpeted as the two smaller theatres are in fact just two rooms. Flat rooms with no seats. It would cost tens of millions of dollars to convert these rooms into theatres.”
“All the light and sound boards are analogue not digital. They are also mid-standard and not high-end,” the report continues. “Most of the fixtures are completely wrong: There are literally hundreds of problems with lighting and sound fixtures and equipment. Some may sound small to laypeople but they mean everything to the technicians entrusted to make sure shows go on.”
“For instance: the bars that the hundreds of light fixtures are on are square and not round. This means that lights can only be pointed in four directions (two of them up to the roof!) and not in gradated choice as on a round bar.”
Tellingly, signage for technical parts of the building is in Chinese, an indication that the design—heavily trumped as being inspired by the Chaconia flower—may not have been original to Trinidad and Tobago.
Additionally, “There are no dressing rooms within reach of the backstage, and no clothing racks, showers and a host of other amenities in the dressing rooms that do exist. This probably can be rectified but it will cost.”
“There are no monitors for backstage and for the stage manager. This probably too can be rectified — but it will cost.”
“The stage-floor is ribbed and is not a sprung floor so is ill-suited for dancing and thus will damage dancers. Theatrical floors are ‘rigged’ so that dancers can dance on then — they have a bounce to absorb and cushion dancers — otherwise it’s like you are dancing on concrete.”
“The dance studios are completely unsuited for dance. The dance-rooms have concrete and terrazzo floors; have dance bars too high; and have mirrors on both walls creating a circus infinite-mirror effect. This means there are effectively no dance studio spaces in NAPA. New properly constructed dance floors will have to be built, one mirrored wall will have to come down and all the dance bars taken down and re-hung.
To add to the litany of complaints, “there are no costume rooms, no set construction rooms and no warehousing rooms.”
Members of the ACTT include Fabien Alphonso, president of the Recording Industry Association of Trinidad and Tobago (RIATT) and Andre Reyes, president of the Artist Teachers Association.
“I don’t know how it could be that the firm that got the contract has a competency in building a performing arts centre,” Victor, who appeared before the Uff Commission of Inquiry into Udecott, the state corporation that built the facility, said. “This is a tragedy of an immense proportion.”
President of the Joint Consultative Council of the local construction industry Winston Riley yesterday noted that aside from functional problems, there have been concerns about the construction materials used for the project.
“There are serious concerns about it as an academy,” he noted, “but we have been concerned about the use of mild steel in the building which we believe would put the building under risk.”
The NAPA was reportedly built pursuant to a Government to Government agreement between Trinidad and Tobago and China, at an estimated budget of about $500 million. There was no competitive tender for the project which was handed to the Shanghai Construction Group, the same company that built the Prime Minister’s Residence and Diplomatic Centre. Efforts to contact SCG were unsuccessful.
When Manning, who had come under fire for his constant defence of Udecott in the face of compelling evidence of corruption at the state enterprise, opened the building last November, he called it, “a masterpiece owned by the people of Trinidad and Tobago.”
At a press briefing last week in London for Commonwealth observances, Manning, the chairman of the Commonwealth, noted that the opening ceremony for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) took place at NAPA. “All in all my dear friends, I think that we were pleased with the outcome. Of course, we were able to expose to the international community a new facility in Port-of-Spain: a National Academy for the Performing Arts (NAPA) which as everybody saw, we believe is acknowledged to be a world class facility in a small developing country, seeking and striving to take its place among the great countries of the world,” Manning said. Udecott has blocked attempts to have an open media tour of the project.
“Taxpayers are going to have to live with this,” Victor said yesterday.
spacer
Keith Smith
Thursday, March 25th 2010
’I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophists, economists and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is gone forever.’’Â
Burke, Edmund
I thought that the decades of work, this middle-class Woodbrook girl, long before it became de rigueur for the socialites to do, spending all those sleepless hours tramping up and down the Hill and along the length of the Corridor, slaving to lift the lot of picky- and knotty-head - blackpeoplechildren, would have counted for something but clearly I’ve been mistaken.
I never thought that all those nights freely giving of time and talent to sundry steelbands strung along and around the Eastern Main Road would have been rewarded with persecution, as if the Laventille letdown was not pain enough, no panman (or woman!), as far as I can tell protesting, first, the stealthy ease with which they removed her from the Carnival Institute.
I never thought that all those years leading her Lydian choir as they sang Handel, Rudder and Kitchener’s music in cathedrals, halls and small churches were but steps along the way to her personal Calvary but clearly I was mistaken, no priest, certainly not any from her Anglican community from which, I guessed, she got her excruciating sense of duty, sermonising when, next!, they knocked her out of the NAPA running.
I never thought that all those great speeches in her past, long in learning and alive with language, were but great last gasps before they saw to her silencing although, perhaps, I should have sensed something, that MATT morning when, seemingly strangely cowed, she spoke around rather than took issue, the reporter posing the museum transfer question, feeling for fire and all but receiving a dousing.
And yet it was that that led to this and other writings, Leroy Clarke causing a lil clamour, the directive having been sent by them that no, she should not speak at some innocuous artists’ gathering, nobody yet confirming who the ’them’’ was, the deeds around her done in the dark and she, weakened in body (all those times of illness, those who love her coming close to giving her up as lost, but always the rebound and continuation of the work, always the work) and, perhaps in mind, the forces ranged against her too powerful to fight she, and I suppose I, would be pushed into thinking.
But who though, are these forces? Or, perhaps more pertinently, wherefore all this fear-filled hate? Have we come to this, then? To a dread place where higher but lesser mortals find themselves mortified in the presence of or even in the conception of original thought serviced by acid, which is to say, scouring lip? When did they so begin to fear the word that it became threat unless indisputably wedded to their own side?
But how could this have come to be? How could the powers-that-be, narrowly and (who knows?) perhaps accurately defined by their supporters as blackpeoplegovernment chose to chew up and spit out into their CEPEP gutters one of their finest daughters, her NAPA thinking, from the very beginning, being that it had to foster dual cultures, the forces of fusion not to be forced but to manifest themselves in tandem with the general will.
Is the finding, then, that there’s no need to cage the bird as long as it not be allowed to sing? Is it, then, that we are heading for a hell of a hole where not just direct dissent but merely a different line of thinking must be met by malice and rage, tolerance, to say nothing of magnanimity, not to be embraced, McGruff’s grim vision, I quote again: ’’2020 is dog eat dog’’?
And if they (that ’they’’ again) could drop the axe on somebody who is a national somebody simply for saying what they think, what hope, then, for anybody who is a national nobody. Look, boy, take yuh ten days and hush! Unless that is, you have power- your own side - trade union, political party, gang, whatever. No individual, independent, unsupported or unencumbered, big enough even to seem to stand against them, the baddest of the bad. Widespread recognition? National approbation? Not even that enough, needless even now to call a name, everybody reading and knowing and going about their whistling.
’The Queen turned crimson with fury, and, after glaring at her for a moment like a wild beast, screamed ’Off with her head! Off’ ’’ ...
Alice in Wonderland
nothing new
it is up to the icons now to step down
but every one is dependent on their wuk
and encouragement she was very surprise to know that I was Mr. Leroy Clarke's brother he has never
mention my name. Many of my pan friends knows Don Clarke. If I was called upon to replace Ms. Bishop as the
feature guest speaker for such an event I would have turned it down, so when I hear about a visibly hurt Leroy Clarke I just smiled to myself. It looks to me like every time someone disagrees with a high official in the present
Government of Trinidad & Tobago they are silence. It takes a very courageous person to speak their concerns
about any topic unless they are twisting the truth. I'll like to hear what was Ms. Bishop concerns about the
Ministry of Culture.