The culture of cultural development: A look at TT (part 1)

Sonja Dumas
Sonja Dumas

SONJA DUMAS

Part I

BACK IN the late 90s, I began writing articles about cultural development as it pertained to the arts, and what that meant for TT. A good few were published in the daily newspapers, and it seemed that I was on a roll. Senior journalists applauded me; one even asked if I would be the dance critic for the paper.

I shied away since, as a dancer myself, I felt that people would feel that I had no right to judge their work as their peer – and most certainly not as their junior. So I shrank away into my own world, behind closed doors, trying to make the cultural milieu of TT more ready for world consumption.

I had figured out since my days of business school that the arts really held a comparative advantage for us in the Caribbean; our largest identifiable export is probably music and Carnival. Our culture is rich, and as cliched as that sounds, it is true. The festivals, the doubles, the liming, even the bacchanal. Imagine if we could export the art of liming as a service.

The arts are a staple for me. I’ve been training and performing as a dancer from very young, and much more recently, I’ve begun making documentary and narrative films about the Caribbean. I was always drawn to the arts. They were, and still are, my heartbeat. So I dare to call myself an artist (mainly of dance and of film) and also a cultural planner and producer. I’ve travelled a lonely road, leaving the corporate world, creating work of my own that isn’t high consumption (read: choreography and low-budget films).

Sonja Dumas conducts a dance workshop with Danza Contemporanea de Cuba in Havana, Cuba, in 2017. Photo by Aldolfo Mesa

At the same time, I try to help other local artists – both performing and visual – to understand how to approach their craft and how to approach the management of it. And for decades I’ve listened to scores of erudite, well-paid analysts at cultural conferences wax intellectual on what is needed.

I’ve made a few of those presentations myself (rarely for payment, might I add. In fact, I’ve often had to pay to participate). I’ve heard politicians outline strategies for diversification into the arts sector. I’ve seen private and national organisations dedicated to the development of the arts come and go. And I’ve most certainly seen the persistence of dysfunctional ones.

There are a few, which, in my estimation, are the backbone of the cultural development of this country, precisely because many people don’t know about them or about how hard they work all year round. All these organisations do is their work, and they have a keen understanding of what that work is.

But in general there’s a recurring institutional problem – one that jeopardises cultural development at its very core.

About ten years ago, my mother, a straight-shooting, no-water-in-her-mouth-when-she-ready kind of woman, and ever the incisive analyst, tried to drum some sense into me, as mothers do. She had witnessed my departure from a good corporate job years before and had seen my descent into a life of sporadic performances and uncertain income.

She went back to the days before I met the world and it met me, when she and my father were living in Europe as a young couple. She would go, she said, to galleries of modern art and sit and contemplate the meaning of a 6x9 feet almost all-white painting against a white wall, and consider it art.

She understood what I was trying to do with my contemporary dance in TT – I was trying to get people to grasp the idea behind the art without being literal. But, she said, “Nobody understands what you’re trying to do.” All she could see was me beating my head against a brick wall. She wasn’t all wrong then, and she’s still not all wrong now.

Part II tomorrow

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