SKN Heritage Day Workshop Profiles

To whet your appetite for what is to come at our St Kitts & Nevis Heritage Day, several of our facilitators would like to introduce themselves to you and tell you a little about what to expect on the day from their sessions.

Hi! My name is Simone, and I am also known as ‘Mone’. I have a Zumba class and it is called: ‘Tone with Mone’.

My class got its name because, I believe my Zumba class is so much more than just dancing to music. It is a full body workout and I do all my choreograph with this in mind. So, not only are you getting a great cardio workout; you are also learning the art of Latin American dance moves, fused together with an exhilarating aerobic workout!

At the St Kitts & Nevis Heritage Day; I will be doing a taster dance/Zumba class. It will be suitable for all ages to join in and have a dance with me. I’ll be bringing the soca/calypso vibes, coupled with a salsa and Latin fuse. All of it music from the heart of the Caribbean. For as I believe and as my slogan stipulates…: “It’s your duty, to shake your booty!”

My Radio Name is Crucial Miss P. (The One and Only) and I co-host and present an internet radio programme with ‘President Kennedy’. Between us both we have over 50 years in the music industry playing a variety of music, playing out in clubs, reasoning with community discussing issues of concerns, or giving out useful information. We’ve also worked with artists involved in music, written and spoken word and the arts.

President Kennedy and I are both descendants of St Kitts & Nevis and we have always jelled well together, from the start, due to our shared heritage.

Our Radio Show call ‘The Vybz Show’ is on Saturdays from 2pm to 5pm (UK time); on www.tellstream.org.

Our listening public love our vybz! They call us the ‘Radio Couple’; with running jokes and a great ‘energy’ that we use to feed off from each other.

We agreed to present a live radio programme broadcast, at the St Kitts & Nevis Heritage Day, because as fellow descendants of St Kitts & Nevis, we want to support ASKaND and their ambition to work with our young people. Educating our youth on their heritage is an important part of their very existence. We believe that bringing the St Kitts & Nevis community together to learn about what their parents and grandparents left behind, in coming to the UK, is essential We also love the work the Association is trying to do across the board. We are very proud of them and we want to encourage and support them.

Hi! I’m Natty Mark and I will delivering the Jumbie Corner workshops at the St Kitts & Nevis Heritage Day, where we will be celebrating the folklore of St. Kitts and Nevis and the wider Caribbean. We will be paying homage to the ‘Moonlit Classroom’, my term for those intergenerational gatherings, when children first learnt the lessons of life, around the evening fire. As with the traditional setting, the workshops will consist of tales, chants and riddles, alongside other participatory aids, such as brain teasers and interactive cartography.

Part of the content will be ‘Rootical’ Folklore. My on-going celebration of African and Caribbean Folklore through the flora. For example, a tale about respect to the elders, features the Kola Nut; pumpkin is central to a tale about generosity; ackee, in one about greed; and spinach in a story of revenge. If we can learn from Anansi, we can learn from the coconut also. Celebrating the heritage of the Moonlit Classroom, while learning and laughing, with our favourite fruits, vegetables, spices and herbs.