Dancer, choreographer, principal, educator and performer at the core, Bridgette Wilson is no stranger to a big stage. Describing performing alongside Machel Montano at St Mary’s College Fete with the Saints as “the best day of my life,” she brought down the house with a passionate rendition of Montano’s 2025 song, Pardy, leaving fete goers chanting “Bridgette! Bridgette!” long after she exited the stage.
Wilson, an avid lover of the mas, remembers being “on cloud nine million” and “feeling like Beyonce” throughout the performance with Montano, a crowning moment and true culmination of her passion for performance, Carnival and soca.
Wilson began dancing at three years old at the Caribbean School of Dancing, where she remained throughout her childhood and teenage years and has returned as a teacher and now the principal of the dance school.
Upon completing secondary school and spending a gap year teaching dance at her alma mater, St Joseph’s Convent Port-of-Spain, she knew that “dance was something that brought me joy and peace, and something I knew I had to have in my life,” which guided her to her chosen course of study at the tertiary level.
Reflecting on her decision to follow her passion, she muses, “I loved dance. I didn’t have the ballerina body or the top technique, and I didn’t know if I could do it. But the teachers at the school encouraged me, and I realised that being involved in dance doesn’t always mean you have to be the dancer.”
Surrounded by a crop of talented dancers at the Caribbean School, many of whom chose dance as a career, Wilson felt solidified in her decision to pursue a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Dance and graduated with honours from York University in Canada. She subsequently earned her Master’s in Choreography from the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in London.
As she cultivated her love for dance, another passion burned inside of her, the love of Trinidad Carnival. Growing up in a big extended family, Wilson vividly remembered spending every Carnival season at her family’s home on Belle Smythe Street in Woodbrook.
“I can still hear the shaking of the house when a big truck was passing down the road,” she says. “As a child, it was so fascinating.”
Those experiences witnessing the bands passing by eventually turned into permission from her grandmother for Wilson and her cousins to “chip from the top of the street to the end of the street and come back home,” instilling in her a fundamental connection to mas.
Throughout her teenage and adult years, she played mas, and on one occasion, she felt that she had enough and “was ready to hang up my Carnival shoes.”
In 2014, she got a call from her friend and creative director of the Lost Tribe, Valmiki Maharaj, with a new idea, “to bring back the art of Carnival, big costumes, a proper portrayal, a vision of beauty,” and thus the Lost Tribe was born.
Maharaj asked Wilson to come on board to work with him on the presentation of the band on the stage, and in Lost Tribe’s 2015 debut, she led and choreographed 25 dancers, who converged on the stage in all white, a show-stopping display that symbolised a resurgence of the original character of Carnival.
“Being part of the Lost Tribe brought back Carnival for me in a whole new light, and for the first few years, I was part of it purely for the love of Carnival.”
After ten years of spending her Carnival Tuesday rehearsing with dancers to prepare for the stages, and in 2024, where “so many little things went wrong, and we didn’t get to do our full presentation,” Wilson entered the 2025 Carnival season with a diminished fervour, lacking her usual zest for the mas.
Though she continued in her role with Lost Tribe, Wilson found herself searching for the spark that once fuelled her passion for the mas.
Then, on January 17, Machel Montano dropped his hit, Pardy, which Wilson heard on the radio on her way to help her students record audition tapes for their summer dance intensive programme.
“This is the best song ever,” she told herself, listening to it on repeat as she parked at the school, and played it for her students to sing and dance to, which she described as “the smallest bit of stress relief.”
On her birthday weekend after the song’s release, she attended a fete, and a spirit told her that she had to take the mic and sing what had quickly become her favourite song.
“I stood next to my friend and told her there’s something in my soul telling me I have to grab the mic and sing this song,” she said, “I couldn’t explain what it was.”
Acting on her instinct, when the song came on, she took the mic and started belting out Pardy to the crowd, and the party was immediately ignited with her energy. The next day, she went to work as normal, and at almost 4 pm, her phone started going off with messages telling her that Machel Montano had posted the video of her singing Pardy and was looking for her as his sidekick performer for the Carnival season. Montano also dropped a Pardy competition, which Wilson entered, submitting a video to win a party with Machel. Her video was widely shared and was directly shared by various people with Montano, which clearly got him well acquainted with her.
On February 8, at Fete with the Saints, Montano easily recognised Wilson’s face in the crowd, as she had planted herself front and centre to hear him perform her favourite song.
“I was dying for this moment to see Pardy performed live,” she recalls. Remembering the moment in the performance where she and Montano’s eyes made four, she says, “His facial expression changed; I could tell he saw me,” and he signalled for her to come on the stage to sing with him.
After sending two of his male dancers to help her over the fence and up the stairs, Wilson took to the stage, and with tears in her eyes, was handed the mic by Montano to sing Pardy.
“This moment brought back how much I miss being on a stage and performing; it was the most exhilarating experience, and it shocked me the way that the crowd had such a strong supportive response to me, a random human.”
The crowd cheered for the ten to 15 minutes she was on stage non-stop, chanting her name and basking in her rendition of the liberating song, commiserating on the song’s sentiment that every hard worker indeed deserves a “pardy”.
When she descended from her rousing performance, she was invited backstage to chat with Montano, and she regaled him with stories of “how I used to stalk him as a teenager walking from school to the dance school and how much I’ve loved his music and performances ever since.”
With the public’s new-found interest in her, she wants to promote more than her own story and share her passion for her career.
“I want to channel people to support the Caribbean School of Dancing to the best of my ability,” she says. “We have had a rough few years after COVID, but we are still battling and need the pardy!”
A defining moment that beautifully encapsulated her various passions, Bridgette Wilson lit up the stage, creating an unforgettable night for everyone present.
