Caribbean Weekend Brings Island Flavor to Middlebury

Author: Andrea LaRocca

A little bit of the tropics came to Middlebury this past weekend with the annual Caribbean Weekend celebration. The events began on Thursday with a screening of the film "Orpheus" and then continued on into Friday with a performance by a traditional steel band called Pan Ivory (pictured above). The steel band is an island cultural staple - the instruments were originally fashioned from oil drums that littered the West Indies after World War II. At Friday's performance, this history could be heard in the musical renditions of songs such as "Amazing Grace" and "Don't Worry About a Thing."
Event organizer Janine Knight '03 called Pan Ivory's performance the best part of the weekend. "It was something that is definitely new to this campus and although I would have liked for a wider cross-section of people to have experienced this, all in all the turn-out was good and the band was amazing," she said. The highlight of the performance for Knight was the moment when the group started playing Bob Marley's "Three Little Birds" and "everyone present (of all different races and cultures) got up and started singing and dancing."
On Saturday, an exhibit in The Grille continued the Caribbean Weekend by featuring the Virgin Islands, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, the Cayman Islands and Barbados. The informational displays focused on each island's variation of "Carnival," which is an annual and highly anticipated celebration in the Caribbean. The display also stressed its importance to the Caribbean culture and lifestyle. Knight said that, although she is Jamaican, she wanted to highlight "cultural aspects of Caribbean life as experienced in the Leeward Islands and Trinidad." Carnival, she pointed out, was "a natural choice" of topic to accomplish this goal. Most importantly, however, Caribbean Weekend brought some of the Carnival celebration to Middlebury, if only for a few nights.
The goal of the weekend, according to Knight, was "to show that although the Caribbean students on this campus are very few, we still have a significant presence and love to share Caribbean culture with the rest of the College community."