CHARLESTOWN, Nevis – DESPITE the financial constraints it faced, Culturama 35 emerged as a successful venture. This is according to Manager of the Culturama Festival Secretariat Antonio Liburd.
Speaking with SKNVibes yesterday (Aug. 11), Liburd said the Festival surpassed all expectations with the tremendous support from revellers and participants surprising organisers.
“We thought that we would be challenged since there would not have been a lot of money to spend, so we started out planning a reduced celebration for the 35th anniversary.
However, as time went along we realised that there were a number of persons who had already booked their flights to Nevis so we did not want to disappoint them.”
According to Liburd, with this realisation came intensified planning with organisers adding a few more events which resulted in a full calendar.
Liburd said that the initial schedule was arrived at after looking at what was happening in the local and global economy.
“We realised that we would have had some difficulty staging the festival this year in terms of attracting sponsorship, and attracting visitors – whether returning nationals or visitors.”
“The execution was a challenge, again given the financial constraints, but looking back over the 10-11 days of the Festival you can describe the overall Festival as a major success for us,” he said.
The financial challenges were many, with a number of major sponsors reducing their contributions. According to Liburd, LIME, which previous contributed over $150 000, reduced its sponsorship by 55 percent. The annual subvention from the Nevis Island Administration was also reduced and several other sponsors pulled out.
Liburd said the Secretariat planned a “tighter” Festival by cutting out unnecessary spending and came up with a budget to fit into what they were working with.
He also admitted that despite the Festival being 35 years, it is still a work in progress: “It is always a challenge to organise a festival of this magnitude…we have not found the correct mix, the correct formula to overcome a lot of the problems that the Festival has been facing over the years. But what I can say is that we continue to work on it year by year.”
He said the issue of shows starting late is one the organisers have been battling for a long time and one that they would continue to battle.
“We see this as one of the areas that needs urgent attention. We have also been battling with show production over the years and we realise that we need to have persons trained in this area and event management so we can improve in these areas.”
Another area identified for improvement is that of judging.
“We need now, starting from probably the end of this month, to begin to look at training of judges for the various competitions, because every year we end up with public outcry about the results not being fair.”
According to Liburd, the organisers are not trying to appease the general public, but looking at the score sheets made them realise that there are some judges who it seems do not quite understand the criteria set out.
“So we recognise that we need to organise workshops so that persons who we select as judges would have a better understanding of a particular criteria, what to look for in judging a particular calypso…whether it is performance, whether it is music, whether it is lyrics…and in other areas.”
Liburd said he hopes to have one or two workshops organised by yearend.
Pointing to the results of this year’s Street Parade, which came out one week later, Liburd said this was one example of why the workshops were necessary. He said some of the judges were not familiar with some areas on their sheets as it relates to what they were looking for. This, he said, produced a number of irregularities.
“As I said before, this is one of the things we will be addressing at our workshops. So in future when we select a particular person to judge, they would be fully aware of what is expected of them, what a certain area in the criteria calls for, so that they would be better equipped to judge any performance based on the guidelines. This is one of the things we will be looking at so we could deliver our results in a timely manner.”
Another anomaly that surfaced during the parade was that of unregistered troupes: “Some were not registered so they were not listed on the judges’ sheets, so we had to do some unscrambling.”
Plans to deal with this include looking at ways to encourage troupes to register ahead of time, setting a deadline for registration and of having incentives for those troupes that register early.
