Soyi­ni Grey

Se­nior Re­porter

soyi­ni.grey@guardian.co.tt

The first prize for the Ul­ti­mate So­ca Com­pe­ti­tion is $1 mil­lion. The new so­ca com­pe­ti­tion will al­so fea­ture a youth com­pe­ti­tion where the win­ner will re­ceive $200,000.

The pro­duc­tion has a bud­get of around $8 mil­lion of which $4 mil­lion will come from the Min­istry of Tourism, Cul­ture and the Arts. Each of the ten fi­nal­ists will re­ceive a $50,000 per­for­mance fee, plus ad­di­tion­al funds to aid in their fi­nal per­for­mance.

The com­pe­ti­tion will em­brace a re­al­i­ty show for­mat much in the vein of X-Fac­tor and Amer­i­ca’s Got Tal­ent. Pro­duc­er Jerome “Rome” Pre­cil­la even met with re­al­i­ty show pro­duc­er Si­mon Cow­ell in Los An­ge­les a few months ago to pick his brain be­fore set­tling on his pitch.

The new for­mat means the tele­vi­sion view­ing as­pect will be pri­ori­tised. There will be sev­er­al shows pro­duced and broad­cast be­fore the fi­nal com­pe­ti­tion.

“One of the main rea­sons for not hav­ing it on Car­ni­val Fri­day is that we want this to be pre-pro­duced,” he ex­plained.

There­fore, the fi­nale will be record­ed on Feb­ru­ary 20, edit­ed and broad­cast dur­ing Car­ni­val week. The date of the broad­cast is still be­ing fi­nalised. It will be shown ex­clu­sive­ly on CNC3, re­gion­al via ca­ble part­ners and in­ter­na­tion­al­ly via Pavil­lion+ a stream­ing ser­vice that is like Net­flix for Caribbean con­tent.

Con­tes­tants will be sourced from across the globe. The win­ners of so­ca com­pe­ti­tions will be in­vit­ed to en­ter. Con­tes­tants who haven’t won com­pe­ti­tions will be in­vit­ed to sub­mit three au­di­tion videos. One video will be of them per­form­ing their com­pe­ti­tion song, the sec­ond will show them per­form­ing be­fore a crowd of at least 1,000 peo­ple and the third an artiste brief. The youth com­pe­ti­tion will be for per­form­ers be­tween the ages of 18-25.

While there will be no sep­a­rate groovy and pow­er com­pe­ti­tion, prizes for the best song in each cat­e­go­ry will be up for grabs.

Mu­sic pub­li­cist Adan­na As­son ex­pressed con­cern about the merged cat­e­gories.

“My con­cern is how do we make the artistes that are sub­mit­ting feel com­fort­able that there is a lev­el play­ing field as far as the judg­ing cri­te­ria is con­cerned?” she asked.

“How are you guys go­ing to struc­ture the se­lec­tion process, maybe that’s my ques­tion, to make the artistes feel com­fort­able that they do have a fair fight­ing chance in the com­pe­ti­tion?”

Pre­cil­la said the points cri­te­ria, which al­lo­cates scores based on per­for­mance, crowd re­sponse and vo­cal abil­i­ty is de­signed to bal­ance the play­ing field be­tween a groovy and a pow­er so­ca per­former.

In De­cem­ber, reign­ing Ca­lyp­so Monarch Machel Mon­tano, who is al­so a mul­ti­ple So­ca Monarch win­ner, voiced an opin­ion that be­yond com­pe­ti­tion, artistes need to fo­cus on their mu­sic, writ­ing, pro­duc­tion and mes­sag­ing. Through­out the years, aca­d­e­mics and com­men­ta­tors have al­so said com­pe­ti­tion has not been good for Car­ni­val.

This view was chal­lenged by Pre­cil­la, who said as an artiste, he felt com­pe­ti­tion brought out a fire in­side per­form­ers a live show did not.

“Not to say that artistes don’t give their 100 per cent when they are per­form­ing at a fete, how­ev­er, when it comes to a so­ca com­pe­ti­tion they go all out,” he said.

Ris­ing artiste Ke­si Tem­pro, a for­mer ju­nior ca­lyp­so monarch and the win­ner of the 2023 Mag­num Sum­mer­Stage com­pe­ti­tion, agrees. She said col­lab­o­ra­tion is great, but younger artistes need the show­case and val­i­da­tion a com­pe­ti­tion pro­vides.

“How could you col­lab­o­rate if you don’t get the op­por­tu­ni­ty to be known?” she asked.

Live au­di­tions for the Ul­ti­mate So­ca Com­pe­ti­tion will be held from 9 am on Jan­u­ary 25 at the Southen Acad­e­my for the Per­form­ing Arts (SAPA). Prospec­tive com­peti­tors need to reg­is­ter via the of­fi­cial web­site: ul­ti­mate­so­cacham­pi­on.com from Mon­day.