weaving magic

One of the most rewarding parts of working on this exciting initiative is to have the assumption constantly reaffirmed that Cape Town has more than the talent needed to make… no create… a brilliant and very unique Cape Town Carnival! There is no way that the analogy of or a comparison can be made to something like the Rio Carnival. For one we are distinctly different (no one samba played over and over here!) simply in culture… but more importantly… we are diverse and complex! If we can marry all these genres together, we going to see a rich tapestry created… and I suspect that these kind of engagements will reinforce the histories and help forge newness and uniqueness that Africa is just so bloody good at!

Step-by-step, we can do this TOGETHER!

so it's been more than 12 months since I first got that call on a Friday afternoon at 17h30 from Rachel to ask whether I will be willing to take on this Carnival baby...

So much has happened since then. We did a wad of research - anyone care to see the 70 page presentation that brought the reality of Carnival to all of us? We decided on a theme "Rhythm, Roots and Boots" and gave birth to a corporate identity.

We had a launch with Helen Zille - 500 invitees, a dance routine happening in 3 weeks, an event meeting where we discussed the almost impossible task of closing Long Street and barely survived and a miracle evening where bergies and tourists and invitees in cocktail dresses and street kids together danced the night away. We've had a million meetings with potential sponsors and we're still going strongly. We've gone on an R&D trip to Rio - which everyone looked at and said "Yeah right and you call that work?" :D

We've gotten an office, which was rather lonely with just me in it for the first while, we've gotten our first sponsor for an operational team (what a blessing) and we've had a team start 5 people in six weeks.

We've had our stakeholder meetings, experiencing the goodwill and excitement and passion that people have for their art and culture, we've had the buy-in of our most important stakeholders. We've had sponsors offering us amazing trade sponsorships. We've been building relationships with communities, organisations, government, corporates.

We've had our moments of frustration and our moments of despair. We've had several moments of disappointment, but even more of pure enjoyment and wonder at the amazing people we get to meet and the awesome power of what passion can do. And watching a miracle unfold. We've had moments of heated debating of exactly how the groups need to be constituted, perform in a way that makes sense and who should be our MC's for events. We've had moments of gentle teasing and rigorous postering ;) (and that's in our internal team :D)

We've signed up our TV partners... we've seen the birth of our Carnival Theme Song...

How far have we come....

After endless cups of coffee, and herbal tea... and herbal tea.. and herbal tea... too many slices of real Italian pizza from the Italian shop on the corner (Timeout), late nights, red-eye flights to Johannesburg, moments of madness and hysteria, endless meetings and pitches... we are still on track!

This is our Recession Carnival, having had had to scale down the carnival in a huge way, taking the current economic situation into account.

But it is happening!!!! and we need everyone to pitch in and help, so that in 244 days we'll be able to enjoy the first fruits of our Carnival venture and all say.... we were part of that!

Come on Cape Town, this carnival belongs to you!

The date has changed! 19 - 21 March 2010!

Hear ye! Hear ye! Hear ye! With the date gremlins playing havoc with the City's diary, we double-booked ourselves with the Argus if we hold the Carnival from 12 - 14 March 2010... We wouldn't want all the cyclist fanatics to miss out on the biggest party to hit Cape Town for the year!

So we've reshuffled the diaries and now have official City permission to hold the Carnival on 19 - 21 March 2010. The aim is to have the annual Carnival on the 3rd weekend of March every year, in between the Argus, the North Sea Jazz Festival and the Two Oceans.

The bonus of 2010's date is that Sunday, 21 March is a public holiday, which means that the Monday will be a public holiday! So for all the people from the North, that means that you can stay for a looooong weekend!

So put the date in your diary... you do not want to miss this!

finding a logo that says it all...

with our bank coffers still empty we needed a logo to be designed and approached some of our colleagues and friends that we've worked with before to assist with some pro bono work...

the one was almost ready to get married, another was on maternity leave, one wanted to start her own business and another was running her own business... but they all pitched in and came up with amazing ideas.

here's a pick of some of the beautiful designs we had to choose from:

After some extensive elaboration we decided upon the one with the heart.

The graphic designer, Kurt Samson from Itopia (www.itopia.co.za) designed the winning design in the early hours of the morning. This is what he had to say about it: "I've loosely used the colours of the City of Cape Town to create the Cape Town Carnival logo. I change the colours slightly to be brighter and sharper, so that the overall logo becomes more colourful and exciting.

The coloured strokes leading to the stars represent our diverse cultures all originating from a single source, the heart of Cape Town, and all being allowed to sparkle at this spectacular event.

I've used the black table mountain (as used in the City Logo) because it is the most identifiable landmark of Cape Town. No other landmark can compete with this icon.

I've brought one added colour into the design, the colour of the year. This colour would change each year, but its tone should be bright and festive. The year also becomes the base of the design, holding all the other elements together."

We want to thank Kurt, Anne-Mart Swanepoel (Option A), Rache Kitching and Suki Locke (www.jaggeddaisy.co.za) for their contributions. We are really thankful!