BASSETERRE, St. Kitts – FORMER Road March winner and Calypso King, Chesil ‘Marc the 1st’ Hamilton believes that the judging criteria once used to determine Calypso Monarchs up until 2006 have been discarded.
Hamilton, during an exclusive interview about his life as a former Calypso artiste, told this publication that of recent he has not been attending much of the Calypso shows but he hears them over the radio from time to time.
”I still take an interest and follow it up from a distance, so to speak. I have been asked to get involved in judging and I have done so on a different level because I always say I don’t want to judge on a senior level, just in case I want to make a return,” Hamilton said.
Hamilton said he had judged at a number of junior and school calypso competitions.
He explained to SKNVibes Entertainment that some past participants had invited him to participate in a monitoring process of the judge’s scores and tallies.
“They asked me to look over the judging system because they were a number of concerns raised. One of difficulties that I observed is that there have been a lot of questioning in recent times about judging; not just the criteria but some of the methodology of judging.”
“In a Calypso competition, the rule is that, let’s say we have seven judges, and in order to give some semblance that bias would not affect the scoring the auditors would eliminate the highest and lowest scores, therefore only five scores will be used,” Hamilton explained.
He added that, from his observation, for the last three years the long-standing rule could have been made non-effective, but now it results in two or more performing artistes to qualify based on bias.
“I am of the belief that this phenomenon and developments of the new criteria could have well and been played out in recent times to ensure certain types of results in the competition of today,” Marc the 1st concluded.
