Gizelle Mor­ris

Hun­dreds lined up from as ear­ly as 6 am out­side the Min­istry of Com­mu­ni­ty De­vel­op­ment, Cul­ture and Gen­der Af­fairs in Bel­mont yes­ter­day, de­ter­mined to get a pair of free in­vi­ta­tions to at­tend "Dance Me, Lover" at the Na­tion­al Acad­e­my for the Per­form­ing Arts next week­end. For most, if not all of the peo­ple who stood sweat­ing un­der a blaz­ing sun, the at­trac­tion was not so much the prospect of see­ing the first com­mand per­for­mance of the Na­tion­al The­atre Arts Com­pa­ny of Trinidad and To­ba­go, but to be one of the first to view the in­te­ri­or of the con­tro­ver­sial build­ing that now stands on what used to be the Princes Build­ing grounds. "You know you see­ing the out­side, but is in­side I want to see. I want to see what they have done, if is just one big open space," one woman ob­served as she stood in line with her daugh­ter.

As the heat in­ten­si­fied and the size of the line grew, one per­son won­dered aloud whether the wait would be worth the while. "It will be worth it," replied an el­der­ly man who tried to es­cape the sun's rays by hid­ing in the nar­row shad­ow cast by a wall. "The kind of equip­ment I see, it will have to be worth it. "You think it easy to get wa­ter, lights and mu­sic to syn­chro­nise?" he asked, re­fer­ring to the foun­tains on the out­doors, which when lit move in tan­dem with melodies that oc­ca­sion­al­ly em­anate from the site. By 8.30 am the line stretched be­yond the min­istry's car park and past the TSTT of­fice as in some cas­es whole fam­i­lies–from grand­moth­ers hob­bling on walk­ing sticks to babes in arms–wait­ed for the much de­sired in­vi­ta­tions.

There were a few peo­ple who, daunt­ed by the length of the line, tried to squeeze in and were im­me­di­ate­ly pounced on by vo­cif­er­ous in­di­vid­u­als in the crowd who shout­ed, "Back of the line! Back of the line!" "We don't want no friend thing!" Fi­nal­ly, at around 9.45 am the dis­tri­b­u­tion of in­vi­ta­tions was un­der way with groups of 20 at a time be­ing al­lowed in­side the min­istry's com­pound. To­wards the front of the build­ing three mem­bers of staff sat at a ta­ble where they took note of the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of the peo­ple in line and hand­ed out the in­vi­ta­tions. Those with­out a form of iden­ti­fi­ca­tion were firm­ly re­fused in­vi­ta­tions.

Sat­ur­day's pro­gramme, sched­uled for 8 pm and which re­quires pa­trons to be for­mal­ly dressed, was the most pop­u­lar as those in line rel­ished the idea of hav­ing to dress up and looked for­ward to min­gling with the dig­ni­taries who are ex­pect­ed to be in at­ten­dance. The shows for 3 pm and 6.30 pm on Sun­day were less pop­u­lar, but by noon, even those tick­ets were gone, snapped up by a pub­lic cu­ri­ous to see the work of the Chi­nese and much crit­i­cised Ude­cott. Scores of peo­ple could be seen as late as 2 pm at the min­istry try­ing their luck. As one woman said af­ter col­lect­ing her two in­vi­ta­tions: "Is my mon­ey spend. Is we mon­ey spend and I want to see if we get val­ue for we mon­ey."