Ger­ard Best

A sim­ple change to the In­ter­na­tion­al So­ca Monarch could give the en­tire con­test a facelift. At least, that's what Caribbean Pres­tige Foun­da­tion for the Per­form­ing Arts (CPF), the or­gan­i­sa­tion be­hind the an­nu­al con­test, is hop­ing.

In aJan­u­ary 13 re­lease, CPF said tha­treign­ing mon­archs will no longer be re­quired to de­fend their ti­tles.

"The de­ci­sion to change the rule of de­fend­ing the ti­tle was guid­ed by a de­ci­sion to align the com­pe­ti­tion with best prac­tices in the glob­al en­ter­tain­ment in­dus­try, where the reign­ing monarch is not ob­lig­at­ed to de­fend their ti­tle," the re­lease said.

The move means that reign­ing Groovy and Pow­er So­ca Monarch Ker­win Du Bois and Machel Mon­tano who won in 2014 with per­for­mances of"Too Re­al" and "Min­istry Of The Road",are not ob­lig­at­ed to de­fend their ti­tles next month.

Or­gan­is­ers say the rule-change will make it eas­i­er for new tal­ent to emerge, cre­at­ing a vir­tu­ous cir­cle of over­all growth in the in­dus­try.

De­fend­ing the ti­tle "shouldn't be a chore, but a choice,"Chair­man Pe­ter Scoon is quot­ed as say­ing. "Artistes should be free to de­cide if they are mo­ti­vat­ed to com­pete or not."

The re­lease said, "we be­lieve that it al­so gives the de­fend­ing cham­pi­on the lee­way to sched­ule their sea­sons in the most ben­e­fi­cial man­ner for their in­di­vid­ual ca­reers and pro­fes­sion­al oblig­a­tions. In this sense, the or­gan­i­sa­tion does not want to lock win­ners in­to the manda­to­ry ded­i­ca­tion of time and re­sources to­wards par­tic­i­pat­ing in the com­pe­ti­tion."

The spe­cif­ic change is torule 2.6 of the con­tract, which lays out the oblig­a­tions of the reign­ing monarch.

How­ev­er, the re­lease al­so said that reign­ing mon­archs "will still be ob­lig­at­ed to per­form all oth­er as­pects of the con­tract."