After two years without a carnival parade, Tribe is looking to enter the 2023 festival with a twist.
From the costume design to the street, Tribe and his family of bands are coming back strong and it all starts next weekend.
The Tribe family of bands – Pure, Bliss, Tribe, Rogue, Harts, Lost Tribe – will reveal their 2023 themes and costumes on Saturday during its three-day festival called Sunset Wkn.
The event aims to be more than just a band launch, says Dean Ackin, CEO of Tribe.
“The pandemic gave us a lot of time to rethink, refresh and innovate…it’s a whole new playing field and one of the things we’ve innovated on is our launch. The departure is usually an evening, a day, an event. This year, in trying to play our part in highlighting and supporting the promotion of tourism, we felt if we were to create a weekend of events, almost like a second carnival in Trinidad, where the whole weekend is filled with activities and you get a taste of carnival. and cultural experience, we will do our part in supporting this effort,” he explains.
The tagline for the weekend is Lime, Slice, Jam.
Lime will take place on Friday along Ariapita Avenue for the Sunset Theatre.
The Sunset Theater is based on the film Tribe’s Lavway, which aired last year.
Tribe Creative Director Valmiki Maharaj says Tribe has always wanted to improve and evolve its contribution to the cultural landscape.
“For years I had a dream to marry the culture of Trinidad with what we see on stages around the world. Not specifically Broadway or Cirque du Soleil or Coachella, just kind of a combination of what those things are. What you will see on the streets will be taking the best of our culture, putting it into a format that people can see and marvel at, and giving us different ways to celebrate ourselves. We are looking at this in a five-year plan and I look forward to seeing this kind of show grow from the Avenue to our green spaces and streets in our city,” says Maharaj.
The Sunset Theatre, supported by the Ministry of Tourism, the Mayor of Port-of-Spain and Carib, will take the form of a parade from Ana to Murray Street along the route. The tagline, Maharaj reveals, is “Seven Shows, One Road”. At each intersection, a different aspect of culture will join the parade.
Actor Nickolai Salcedo, who starred in Lavway, will narrate the event.
The party and costume reveal takes place on Saturday.
This year, however, the costume presentation will take the form of a theatrical presentation to make the unveiling shorter, tighter and more impactful.
Creative director Valmiki Maharaj says the show will fit within a 40-minute span.
“There will be a story. Each group has their own unique theme and they have their own way of executing them, so we’re going to collect different parts of those stories and bring them together,” he says.
The main theme for the gang family is Carnival Magic, but each gang has its own theme related to this. While not revealing the themes, Maharaj says they play a role in telling the story of the new tribe.
“It’s our story of coming out of these last three apocalyptic years, this moment that was so dramatic, it was so desperate, it was so devastating, but for us, it was really constructive, really productive and really a blessing in disguise in many ways. way and that’s the approach we’re taking. You won’t hear about Covid, we’re not talking about masks, what we’re presenting is the positivity of moving forward and what we learned from it,” he explains.
The party takes place on Sunday and is called the Last Jam Carnival.
THE DREAM by JP Richardson for The Lost Tribe
The event is meant to mimic the road experience and will see customers step out in costume to celebrate the return to the road in 2023.
Another aspect of Sunset Wknd is Sun Sweat, a free fitness event that will be held on Saturday morning.
Ackin says they hope to make it a regular feature in the run-up to the road experience in 2023.
like clocked out on what would have been this year’s Shrove Tuesday, Tribe kicked off 2023 early with a video showing clowns on the street and the words “We’re ready” and followed up with a pop-up announcement about the clowns of the year 2020 to register for next year.
Ackin says the response has been overwhelming.
“The temperature is at fever pitch,” he says with a laugh. “We definitely haven’t completely sold out the set, but a large percentage have sold out.”
Asked about the cost of the costumes given the current global inflation, Ackin said that while they are trying to minimize the cost to the masqueraders, there may be a slight increase.
“This is now one of our biggest challenges. There’s hyperinflation and prices are changing almost every week and it’s worldwide because of the pandemic and the war and it’s certainly affecting carnivals and the carnival industry,” he says.
“We have to price a product that we have to deliver in six months and things will change. We are trying to minimize the impact on the masquerade. We’re working closely with our suppliers and trying to price the costume packages in a way that people can still afford it, but I suspect you’ll see a little bit of an increase.”
Maharaj says that design-wise the group has been working on a few things that will help keep prices down, but won’t be released until after next year.
However, he assures, with a determination to give masqueraders something new and fresh and with the challenges faced by designers in finding new material, they have increased innovation.
“It was almost Project Runway like you wanted to take the same bag of tricks and do something new and generally they did,” he says.
“Engineering, shape, fit, color, every category you can think of, every group hit it.”
