WOW but its been a very long, very full day at the 2013 Rex
Nettleford Arts Conference on Sustainability, Social Transformation, and the
Creative Industries at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing
Arts in Kingston, Jamaica (quite a mouthful, and quite a day). Let me see –
today is um…Thursday; I left my house in Ft. Myers yesterday at 5:00am, drove
to Miami, parked at the Airport Marriott (great deal - $4.50/day, free
shuttle), was checked in by 8:00 and sitting down with my usual Cuban swiss
cheese and tomato Miami Airport sandwich by 9:00, boarded the plane at 10:20
and landed in Jamaica two hours later. Eeeeeeeeasy. No problem with immigration
or customs, headed out to the curb to find the taxi I booked with my hotel and
…no taxi. There was a very handy Digicell office right there so I got yet
another $5.00 sim card for my travel phone and called the hotel where
apparently I had no reservation despite the ten or twelve emails we exchanged
on the subject but no problem they had a room available and of course there was
an airport cab very happy to drive me into Kingston. I had booked into the
Indies Hotel because it appeared to be easy walking distance to the much more
expensive Knutsford Court conference hotel where I could catch the daily
shuttles up to the Manley College and that did in fact turn out to be true. I
have a perfectly comfortable little room on the ground floor with three single
beds, a safe in the closet for an extra US dollar a day and while the water
temperatures in the shower are wildly variable the window AC works just fine
and the restaurant has lots of vegetarian options (to cater to the
Rastafarians, of course). I spent the afternoon and the evening yesterday
cramming for my conference presentation, sorting out the rental car for
Saturday, attending an opening dance performance, seeing some familiar faces,
finding out that Monday is a national holiday so there goes some of the things
I had planned to do, generally agonizing over everything and not sleeping much
at all.
Today, however, was just great in every way. One of the
speakers in the main panel was David Brown, the director of the African
Caribbean Institute of Jamaica and the perfect person to enlist in my crusade
to go back into Trenchtown to interview ‘walkaround style’ potters I met and
photographed fifteen years ago. On the bus this morning I renewed my friendship
with the amazing Marielle Barrow of Caribbean InTransit (terrific online
journal and networking site for contemporary Caribbean art) and she knows David
so he had been warned already when I descended on him after the panel but he
couldn’t have been more supportive. After several phone calls and an
introduction to Jamaican ceramics professor and incredible drummer Phillip
Supersad we had a plan to meet up next Tuesday to head into Trenchtown with
Phillip who knows these potters I’m trying to find. I love the Caribbean.
There’s always a way to get where you’re going because people are just so
great. I had a great chat too with David Dunn, also on the ceramics faculty,
and he came to my talk as did several of his students and David Brown and
Marielle Barrow and it went just fine – the images all looked great, and in my
twenty minutes I managed to say some useful and interesting things (title of
the presentation: “A Fragile Enterprise: Is There a Place for Tradition in the
New Creative Economy ?”). The rest of the day kept going like that – met and
listened to lots more fascinating people, ate some pretty good food in the
campus cantine, made very reassuring phone calls to confirm my visits to
potters on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. The day wrapped up with the opening
ceremonies for the conference in the evening with fire-breathing acrobatic
Jonkonnu dancers, a lovely performance by the Jamaican National Folk Singers, some
interesting roots reggae/rap fusion music, and a quite good speech on the
creative industries by a national politician who was both knowledgeable and
personable (he had a great line about politicians as performers – and then
amended that to ‘non-performers’.) All in all a worthwhile evening but by the
time the last Jonkonnu dancer cartwheeled off the stage around 9pm I was nearly
comatose from weariness and am now going to pass out altogether because
tomorrow we start right up again at 8:30am. Jamaican pictures and thoughts on
the writing of the book to follow soon…
pictures ? what pictures ? my goodness, this commentary needs a little something, what could it be........oh yes, pictures ! (don't worry, other commenters, I'm allowed to heckle, I'm family)
ReplyDeleteComing right up Katie....
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