Interview with Jared Prima, Interim Chief Executive Officer, The Tobago Performing Arts Company (TPAC)

24 Feb Interview with Jared Prima, Interim Chief Executive Officer, The Tobago Performing Arts Company (TPAC)

TPAC is charged with advancing Tobago’s performing arts excellence and preserving local culture. Could you explain what your major achievements pertaining to those missions have been?

TPAC started in 2021 and has been focused on creating and shaping what might be that Tobago cultural product. It’s about showing how we can marry the culture with the arts. We spent a lot of time convincing the public that it is worth investing in our arts, particularly in an orange economy that has been booming and has continued to grow and we have all the data that says it is going to outpace oil eventually. We have continued to convince the public that this is worth the investment. We’ve done several productions across the country, we had a lot of great results with that, Bitter Cassava being our most popular one.

All our productions are multimedia type productions. It’s about capacity building. We are very focused on building capacity on the ground so that we can also have quality control of our products. Because we’re looking into the future, we’re going to create the product here to convince the audience first that this is worth doing. We have this wealth of knowledge in our culture and identity that we can show to the world through the arts.

We want to create products where you can learn. We’ve had a lot of avenues for that. Two things we’re very proud of: we created a multidisciplinary festival this year called Fource, where we showcased dance, drama, music and film. It’s supposed to be a platform that allows foreign creatives to come and showcase what they have. We will show them what we have and they could come and show up what they have. This is what the future of the Creative Arts is like. It’s almost a hub for creativity. It is also a safe space for artists. It’s an incubator, a platform and it’s a showcase of what we have for the world to come and show us what they have too.

Apart from teaching, it’s also about collaboration. There are a lot of entities out there that we want to connect with. This year, we collaborated with Tobago’s animation studio, E-Pixel, and we did a short animation called History, Hooves and Horns. It focuses on a very unique Tobago thing: the Tobago goat racing and crab racing. The animation studio created an animation around it and TPAC supplied the voice acting and the audio production and the song score and that’s how we, as the performing arts company, with these resources, can support these types of initiatives.

Then, of course, the final one, which is our baby: Kreative Kalabash which is an arts summer camp for children. The kids had a wonderful experience. We had the child of our tourism secretary and the daughter of our administrator. They both saw a complete change in the behavior of their children just because they’ve been exposed to the arts. We are showing parents that this is the power of the arts. I had one parent who told me their son but after four days in the camp he was drumming, singing and dancing. She was completely in shock. This is the power of the arts and that’s what TPAC is doing to the space.

We also want to build capacity because this is not a one man show. Everyone can assist in the development of the arts in the island. We want to help you see how you can use your own art to help in this cause, in this fight. With the heavy influx of social media like TikTok we have special dancers here and I would love to see a wave of our young people posting our Tobagonian dances, our Tobagonian customs and the way we speak. There’s so much content to create.

Tobago’s standalone Carnival is in its third iteration. What have been the biggest takeaways of the event from your perspective and how are you seeing the event growing and improving each year?

For me, the biggest takeaways are seeing how we have been crafting the product to speak in its own way to a Tobago identity. We have seen that that has begun to happen. People have begun to be inspired by our waterfalls or flora and fauna, our folklore, in their costumes. Someone had a band launch about sailors and it became a whole production about sailors at sea and they were out at the port. We are seeing people engage in the ritual, because we have those three words for a carnival: Ritual, Revelry, meaning the freedom from creative constraints, and Release.

Carnival continues to be that festival of freedom of expression. For us, we are infusing a freedom of expression of the uniqueness of Tobago. Ritualistic things are important to us in terms of how we open our carnival. Particularly, we are seeing an increase in Mud Mas, using mud as costume. Mud is a very major part of the Tobago Carnival product. We have begun to get more buy in terms of having our locals on the ground as well to promote it. It’s sometimes sad that we have to have an outside element tell us how good our products are. People have found Mud Mas to be very freeing. There’s a group called Muddaland who have taken the tradition of mud, packaged it and sent it to other festivals and carnivals across the world. That’s a good example of where our carnival can head to.

We have more support now on the ground from our own people. Our vendors and our local artisans are excited. You have craft. It’s really a festival that brings people in to experience Tobago. It’s not just about the events. I mean, come and go to the beach.  come and take a little crab and dumpling. Enjoy yourself. Or, as we say, come and revel in paradise. You get to revel and if you’re still here, sea, sun, sand, food, culture, people: enjoy yourself!

Carnival is always the last weekend of October. For us, we start on a Friday, all over the country, all over the streets. In Tobago during the national carnival, we focus more on the children. The kiddies get to go into town and they play with their costumes. We have Calypso competitions, we have steelpan on the road. A very important part of our typical Carnival is Rhythm, Steel and Powder. That’s how we infuse our rhythms, our percussive instruments, which is not just a pan, but how we beat iron and create energy. That’s a very major part of it for us as well.

How are you working to maximize the allocation for cultural activities and festivals and how can greater promotion of Tobago as a destination in its own right assist with this?

The allocation is not sufficient, as was expressed by the chief secretary and his team. We will feel it the most in the arts, because the arts always have to, in a sense, prove their worth. It is our hope that, through international exposure, international partnerships as well, we can create these relationships that can show the central government that this is a product that is worth investing in. Tobago will continue to do its part in the way that it sells its tourism product, that it supports the growth of its tourism product, which is where TPAC comes in. TPAC has to collaborate with the other companies, Tobago Festival Commission, Tobago Tourism Agency Limited. I call it Tobago’s USP: the creative products are Tobago’s unique selling point.

Giving more investment into arts allows us to be more marketable and collaborate more. We can sell our creative products once they are packaged correctly, through avenues like film tourism which can encourage visitors, who want to do two things. One, they want to come and see where this was shot and they want to live and be part of this experience. And two, we still have production houses who are looking to come to countries who have existing rebate systems to use as a location. Tobago can still be a location that is sought after. We are seeing in the international circuits that there is a call for more cultural content, unique content, because entities like Netflix and Amazon Prime want to position themselves as being different to the other. That’s where we come in, in terms of showing this is our very unique product and we have all these amazing stories.

What does the future hold for TPAC and for Tobago as an arts, sport, or paradise space?

For me, the work has just begun. We are going to continue on the train that we’re on in terms of developing well created, produced and curated content that can do the job of showcasing Tobago and can earn revenue through being sold as creative products. We’re going to continue to partner with establishments, both locally and internationally, that want to assist in the development of the Tobagonian unique product. We’ve had a few people calling us already. We want to continue to connec and make ourselves accessible.

We are going to expand the brand of Fource. We think that festival has amazing potential in bringing people, showcasing creative technologies, telling our stories, allowing for music exposure, and allowing for dance excellence. We’ve been approached by a very major dance company in Jamaica, that wants to come to Tobago to do works. We’ve already begun to connect regionally and we have a few tenders out internationally.

We want to continue to build capacity on the ground and get ourselves in a mode of readiness for when the true orange boom happens here. We want to get our people ready for that orange boom when it happens.

What would be your final message to the readers?

Tobago’ unique and rich culture is more than just performance and presentation; it is what defines us as a people. We are very proud and passionate when it comes to who we are and our cultural history and we invite you to come, share experience and see what it is like to be part of this paradise experience.