Basseterre, St. Kitts, January 19, 2017 (SKNIS): Chairman of Carnival, Noah Mills, announced recently that plans have already started for Sugar Mas 46 and that a tentative timetable has already been drawn up and sent to the Minister of Culture, the Honourable Shawn K. Richards, which will see innovative ideas and new initiatives come on stream.
Speaking on the radio-television programme “Working for You” on January 18, Mr. Mills said that some of these innovative ideas and new initiatives include plans to host a prince and princess show, to issue a carnival magazine and to convene for the first time a Caribbean Carnival Chairman’s Convention, which he termed the 4Cs.
According to the carnival chairman, the defunct prince and princess show, also known as the talented youth competition, will be brought back on board as part of efforts to concentrate on building a positive culture among our youth, whom he deemed the nation’s future.
“We are concentrating on the youth and we need to ensure that this is not only for transition and continuity, but involvement,” said Mr. Mills, while adding that “if they are positively involved in something they will not have idle hands to do other things.”
He said that plans to have the prince and princess show as part of Sugar Mas 45 proved to be a challenge.
“We realized it was so very expansive because we have over 20 primary schools in St. Kitts and Nevis and to have both prince and princess, this would mean that there would be a minimum of 40 little ones on one night,” he said. “So, we will approach the primary schools. We will zone them and then have the final winners of each zone competing.”
Mr. Mills said that there is a plan to host what he called the 4Cs—Caribbean Carnival Chairman Convention.
“We are going to be making contact throughout the carnivals across the region because we find that as much as we are different, we are very alike,” said Mr. Mills. “Their rules and regulations, their interpretation of criteria, their models for costume making, for calypso, for Soca, and all of these things, we can learn from each other.”
For example, he believes that there should be a regional syllabus for carnival judges where after they would have completed the judges training course they will receive certification that would be acceptable in other islands in the region that host carnival.
Mr. Mills said that this Caribbean Carnival Chairman’s Convention would be beneficial to people who play an integral part in carnival, including artists, sponsors and organizers.
“I think such a convention will also help us to secure performance stints for our artists, where I know the raining groovy Soca monarch would know that we have a network in place because at the convention we agreed to him going to Grenada automatically as a guest artist for a function that is being held there.”
Another plan of the chairman is the launch of a carnival magazine during the St. Kitts Music Festival, the Sugar Mas magazine.
Mr. Mills said that the magazine will have in it picture, interviews, notes and the like and “would serve as a tool for the first marketing stint, tactic or strategy that the carnival committee will use.”
Also, he said that courses in Soca Writing, Calypso Writing, Costume Making and Video Production will be introduced by the St. Kitts and Nevis National Carnival Committee this year.
