Richard Lord

Ex­ec­u­tive Chair­man of the Ur­ban De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion of T&T Calder Hart says the Na­tion­al Acad­e­my for the Per­form­ing Arts (North Cam­pus) is for the en­ter­tain­ers of this coun­try. In an ex­clu­sive in­ter­view af­ter tak­ing the Sun­day Guardian on a guid­ed tour of the mil­lion-dol­lar fa­cil­i­ty in Queen's Park East, Port-of-Spain, last Fri­day. It is to be for­mal­ly opened by Prime Min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning to­mor­row. More than 1,000 spe­cial­ly in­vit­ed guests are ex­pect­ed to at­tend the gala open­ing cer­e­mo­ny. The acad­e­my was con­struct­ed by Shang­hai Con­struc­tion of Chi­na un­der a gov­ern­ment to gov­ern­ment arrange­ment.

Among the en­ter­tain­ers list­ed to per­form at the open­ing are the Di­vine Echoes Or­ches­tra and East­ern Youth Chorale. "Any­one who looks at this project with an in­de­pen­dent mind will come to the con­clu­sion that it is a sim­ply mag­nif­i­cent ad­di­tion to this coun­try's phys­i­cal land­scape," Hart said. Ac­cord­ing to Hart, the project is an­oth­er step to­wards the re­al­i­sa­tion of the Gov­ern­ment's Vi­sion 2020 de­vel­op­ment plan for T&T. He said it rep­re­sents a Gov­ern­ment de­sire "to en­hance the na­tion's cul­tur­al ap­pa­ra­tus."

He said it will al­low for the de­vel­op­ment of com­mer­cial cul­ture, trans­form­ing from a teach­ing to a per­form­ing en­vi­ron­ment for artistes and a fo­rum where the most up-to-date tech­nol­o­gy will be avail­able to the artistes to per­form. Hart said there has been an over­whelm­ing re­sponse from ca­lyp­so­ni­ans and Pan Trin­ba­go of­fi­cials who have al­ready vis­it­ed the fa­cil­i­ty. "The re­ac­tion has been very favourable. "I am yet to have a pro­fes­sion­al en­ter­tain­er come and say he is dis­sat­is­fied with what we have achieved here," he added.