Yvonne Ba­boolal

With a PHD in Car­ni­val stud­ies, Cyril Col­lier, who has been put in charge of this year's Di­manche Gras, says some peo­ple are bored by the ca­lyp­so seg­ment and he has sought to short­en the time it oc­cu­pies.

Col­lier, a Uni­ver­si­ty of T&T lec­tur­er, who said his stud­ies fo­cused on the dra­ma and the­atre of the Di­manche Gras, said he was "very pas­sion­ate" about bring­ing the Di­manche Gras back to the days of the plan­ta­tion own­ers. He was not very suc­cess­ful.

He said he tried to get the num­ber of ca­lyp­so­ni­ans per­form­ing in the Na­tion­al Ca­lyp­so Monarch seg­ment cut down to eight but was told he was lucky he got 12. Col­lier, who said he was put in charge of the Di­manche Gras by Min­is­ter of Arts and Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism Win­ston "Gyp­sy" Pe­ters, said in an in­ter­view yes­ter­day: "Do you know what Di­manche Gras means? Fat Sun­day. You cre­ate a show with all the el­e­ments, mas, ca­lyp­so and steel­pan. "The three en­ti­ties must en­joy the same amount of time," he said.

"Some peo­ple leave the Grand Stand be­fore the ca­lyp­so seg­ment is fin­ished be­cause they are bored.

"You have 12 ca­lyp­so­ni­ans singing two songs-That's al­most three hours and 45 min­utes. "There is lit­tle time for much else. Peo­ple have the con­cept that the Di­manche Gras show is a ca­lyp­so show. "It is not! It is the cul­mi­na­tion of the best of Car­ni­val. We have turned it in­to a ca­lyp­so com­pe­ti­tion. That should nev­er be!" Col­lier said the best Di­manche Gras was pro­duced in the 1960s by an Eng­lish­man/Trinida­di­an called Arthur Bent­ley.

He said the theme of this year's big show was All Ah We Is One and would have a spe­cial cap­sule show­cas­ing, through dance and tra­di­tion­al mas, the dif­fer­ent peo­ple who lived in T&T, from the Amerindi­ans right down to the Syr­i­an/Lebanese com­mu­ni­ty. He said there would be a uni­ty ca­lyp­so, and Shad­ow, in a sep­a­rate act, would sing One Love, while every­one would be asked to join hands. Asked for a com­ment, Trin­ba­go Uni­fied Ca­lyp­so­ni­ans Or­gan­i­sa­tion (Tu­co) pres­i­dent Broth­er Re­sis­tance (Lu­ta­lo Masim­ba) said: "If it is that Mr Col­lier, or any oth­er pro­duc­er, find it have too much ca­lyp­so on Sun­day night, we at Tu­co are will­ing to ac­com­mo­date them by tak­ing the com­pe­ti­tion and putting it on an­oth­er night."

Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies lec­tur­er, Dr Gor­don Rohlehr, said his im­pres­sion over the years was that the ca­lyp­so seg­ment of the Di­manche Gras, in­stead of bor­ing the au­di­ence, cre­at­ed a kind of ten­sion about who would win. "Peo­ple are al­so in­ter­est­ed in the po­lit­i­cal bac­cha­nal and look for­ward to see­ing how the ca­lyp­so­ni­ans por­tray the politi­cians," he said. "This cre­ates an­oth­er kind of dra­ma, not the dra­ma of a stick­fight or a sailor­man's dance as is un­der­stood to be dra­ma. "The re­al hu­man in­ter­est is what the ca­lyp­so­ni­ans are singing...The lo­cal com­mu­ni­ty is in­ter­est­ed in that." Rohlehr sug­gest­ed that the show should not be changed for vis­i­tors, who should, in­stead, be told: "This is how we do it." Ad­mit­ting that the length of time al­lot­ted to each ca­lyp­son­ian could be short­ened, Rohlehr not­ed, too, that the whole of Car­ni­val was al­so about that kind of ex­cess (long shows).