Michelle Loubon

Reign­ing Car­ni­val band­leader Bri­an Mac Far­lane says the Na­tion­al Acad­e­my for the Per­form­ing Arts (NA­PA) is "fab­u­lous," but he ad­mits there were some is­sues to be ad­dressed like the door and floor­ing.

In a tele­phone in­ter­view, Mac Far­lane said: "I can­not com­ment on Rubadiri's con­cerns but I would imag­ine he has the arts close to his heart." Re­cent­ly, the Artist Coali­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go (ACTT), led by its in­ter­im pres­i­dent Rubadiri Vic­tor, has con­tin­ued to raise its con­cerns about the state-of-the-art ed­i­fice's con­cep­tu­al, tech­ni­cal and pro­gram­ming flaws at a news con­fer­ence at The Pro­fes­sion­als Cen­tre, Mu­cu­rapo, yes­ter­day. "There are is­sues like the doors that take you in­to back­stage. They are eight by eight and are not suit­able for bring­ing in large sets. "For the shows, we had to cut them down and reweld the props," said Mac Far­lane.

Mov­ing across to the floor­ing, he said: "The ac­tu­al floor­ing is not the right type. When we spiked the area (marked the area where the per­form­ers had to stand) we had prob­lems re­mov­ing the coloured tape. "When we pulled it off it, it re­vealed the wood­en sur­face of the floor­ing. It is like a lam­i­nate floor­ing. The floor sur­face cov­er­ing is not go­ing to last long," added Mac Far­lane. He and his team had to ad­just the cur­tains, too, he said.

"They need to have dif­fer­ent coloured cur­tains. They had emer­ald green and yel­low and black cur­tains for the side wings. "Oth­er than that, we cov­ered the 'legs' with black suede," he said. Mac Far­lane al­so ad­mit­ted there was still a mea­sure of "tweak­ing to be done."