The Morning After

Carnival is a time when the bulk of the population – if one concedes that it is our biggest cultural celebration – lets its hair down, goes into a state of bacchanalian revelry and allows itself to wallow in a state of near-delirium from Friday evening to Tuesday night.
On the Wednesday morning, the tendency is to rest up and slowly recuperate from the effects of the excesses we may have committed over the four days, and is hardly a time for sober reflection and assessment of the denouement of the incidents that took place while we were in the state of induced torpor.
Most of us are virtually still asleep, so a clear-headed evaluation of the celebration will have to wait for another day. In the old days, we used the Wednesday to “bury Vaval” while we underwent the recuperative process, applying icepacks to our aching foreheads, in an effort to somehow crawl back to some trace of normalcy, so that we could resume the course of everyday living.
But those days went out with the changing of the Carnival date, so yesterday (when this piece was written), despite aching heads and joints, even before all the votes are in and points of view expressed, we decide to strike while the iron is still hot and give a preliminary overview of what went down this 2KGreat Carnival.
For days and weeks, we have been reporting and commenting on calypso, pan, soca etc., so this piece will reflect the bands’ participation and contribution to the festivities.

The single biggest new feature this time around was the location and length of the route along which the bands paraded. In general, the new arrangement seems to have gone down well with most of the revellers themselves, who appreciated the ability to jump in peace without having spectators from overcrowded city streets mingling in with them and spoiling the enjoyment for which they had paid dearly, in money and weeks of preparation.
On the other hand, here is an observation: that part of the route where the judges were placed did not allow for enough space for bands to stage any elaborate presentation – so that most did little more than put a bit more energy into their gyrating, in the hope of finding favour in the judges’ eyes … with the added drawback that even those who made the effort of trying to put on some sort of show/presentation, did so before the eyes of – and for the benefit of – solely the judges, with only the relatively few spectators who happened to find themselves situated at that part of the route as an audience … which, in comparison with past years, greatly diminished the amount of crowd/band interaction, so important in the delivery of a performance.
In days to come, there will be much discussion about the various aspects of the bands’ participation; about the level of originality and creativity evidenced; about the disappearance the various categories – Original, National, Historical etc., under which judging took place … and others.
But this is just Wednesday morning and that will all be threshed out when heads are a bit clearer and the mists created by the exhilaration of the past days have dissipated.
Also, in a forum with a bit more space than this editorial column.