Culture
Grand Kadooment
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rand Kadooment is the culmination of the Crop-Over festival and is held every year on the first Monday of August. It’s an all-day street party, which explodes with colour, revelry, and pulsating Barbadian calypso music. Scores of organised costumed bands compete in this annual parade with membership in individual bands ranging from a handful to thousands of colourfully clad people. Each band is designed around an overall theme and traditionally, most feature several sections depicting various aspects of that theme. Some of our best local fashion designers and artists are involved year-round in producing these unique, vibrant works of art. The costumes come in all sorts of wonderful varieties and are generally constructed of beads, feathers, glitter, body paint, and sequins. You name it, and it’s there. The base of the costumes is usually a bathing suit, onto which all the elaborate accessories are added in intricate designs. It’s difficult to imagine,
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especially if you’ve never seen it, that there are so many ways to wear shorts, or a bikini and a few beads. The most eye-popping manifestations are on display. The registered bands are often punctuated by local characters that create their own costumes for the day, some of these can be just as eye-catching as that from band designers, but most quite often than not, border on the ridiculous and are done for a laugh. Once all of the bands are assembled at the appointed start, the festivities begin; as one by one they parade before the judges and begin to fill the streets with revelry and pandemonium. Each band has music trucks pounding out the sweet sounds of each year’s Calypso hits and the revellers, as those who participate are affectionately called, dance through the streets celebrating our magnificent history and our promising future. It’s really a spectacle to behold, so if you happen to be here on August 2nd be sure to join us for our biggest and best festival of the year.