Pe­ter Christo­pher

Se­nior mul­ti­me­dia re­porter

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

Queen's Hall has qui­et­ly been mak­ing a steady con­tri­bu­tion to the coun­try's Gross Do­mes­tic Prod­uct, ac­cord­ing to the gen­er­al man­ag­er of the per­for­mance space, Garfield George.

"Al­most all peo­ple think of Queen's Hall as just a per­form­ing arts cen­tre, but we see Queen's Hall as an in­dus­try. As a grow­ing in­dus­try in fact, this year our theme is the world is a stage and we want to bring the­atre to the world and to show how the world con­nects to what we do at Queen's Hall, " said George at the re­cent­ly con­clud­ed Trade and In­vest­ment Con­ven­tion at the Cen­tre of Ex­cel­lence in Ma­coya.

George not­ed the space had ex­pe­ri­enced con­sis­tent book­ings since the end of the lock­downs as­so­ci­at­ed with the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic.

"We con­tribute sig­nif­i­cant­ly to the GDP of Trinidad and To­ba­go and all the down­stream busi­ness that comes out of Queen's Hall, from not on­ly the artistes, but the pa­trons that at­tend Queen's Hall as well. We have over 90,000 pa­trons each year as a re­sult of our events," said George, who ex­plained the venue hosts 150 events an­nu­al­ly.

He not­ed that these events of­ten pro­vide work op­por­tu­ni­ties dur­ing the var­i­ous pro­duc­tions that are held at the event, in­clud­ing set de­sign and cos­tum­ing, which are key el­e­ments for the­atri­cal pro­duc­tions.

"It costs over $100,000 to put on a pro­duc­tion, so if you do the equa­tion, we con­tribute sig­nif­i­cant­ly to the econ­o­my. For the down­stream busi­ness, we talk­ing about food, cos­tumes, set de­sign, make­up artists. The down­stream busi­ness ben­e­fits from Queen's Hall," said George, who added that the venue has al­ready been booked sig­nif­i­cant­ly for the next two years.

George said Queen's Hall will be host­ing an event called "To­geth­er" in Sep­tem­ber, which will fea­ture an in­ter­na­tion­al as­pect.

"We're go­ing to col­lab­o­rate with Japan this year in Sep­tem­ber, and we have an event in Sep­tem­ber from the 20th to the 23rd, where we go­ing to have an in­ter­na­tion­al con­fer­ence at Queen's Hall it­self," said George.

Queen's Hall had a booth at TIC for the very first time this year, where George sought to ex­plain the the­atre's grow­ing reach.