Young people got the opportunity to showcase their talent at the first ever Parang Tent Youth Night hosted by the National Parang Association of Trinidad and Tobago (NPATT) on Sunday.
The Tent also featured the winners of the Junior Parang Festival.
The winners in the Primary Schools category, St. Gabriel Girls RC Primary School, shared that seeing the reaction from crowds when they perform motivates them to put on a show.
Student Maria Ramesar said what it meant to her: “I love Soca parang but I really just enjoy singing and when they called for parang, Standard 4 and 5 choir for parang, I just decided to join because I said why not? All the people in choir, I know they love parang because whenever we sing like a line of song, everybody would try and start singing.”
The winners in the Secondary Schools category, Fatima College, had similar sentiments.
Head Prefect Liam Gooding said his background in parang was his inspiration for asking his school to start a parang group.
“I come from a paranging family and it was always something that I enjoyed doing and I pushed for it a lot at Fatima while I was there and we finally got permission to form a band.”
Youth Officer at NPATT, Joseph Bertrand, said the Parang Tent’s Youth Night provided a non-competitive space for the young parranderos to perform freely.
“At the Youth Night, we feature the Junior Parang winners and we also feature the Senior bands. However the younger of the Senior bands so we have Los Sonidos, bp Serenaders, Voces de Promesa, and many many others coming to bring their style of parang here at the Parang Youth Night.”
He said the Association was elated to provide such a space.
“It is an amazing show of our youth in parang and to know that parang is in amazing hands and parang is alive and well. Tonight is a testament of that, our youth performing in the parang circuit.”
Mr. Bertrand said while there is interest in parang by many of the students, there are some challenges in teaching the art of parang.
“The problem is the tutors, the limited tutors for these schools so that is something that we are working on as the Association to have tutors within the schools working with our youth in this sphere of our culture, parang.”
Despite this, he said the turnout for NPATT’s Schools Parang Competition continues to grow as the competition itself saw 23 Primary Schools and 16 Secondary Schools vie for the top spot.