Jamaican diver Yona Knight-Wisdom hopes his uncharacteristically large frame will not only help him stand out among his competitors at his first Olympics but also enable him to win by making as small a splash as possible.
Standing at 1.89m tall and weighing close to 90kg, the first male diver from the Caribbean island to qualify for the Olympics is at least 20cm taller than the slight Chinese divers who dominated the London 2012 Olympics.
While Knight-Wisdom sees his height as a disadvantage that prevents him from spinning as fast as other divers, his weight allows him to propel himself higher from the springboard and execute the harder dives, he said.
“My advantage is that I’m able to get a really clean entry into the water, so I make very little splash,” said Knight-Wisdom, who competes in the individual 3m springboard event. “I’m just aiming to keep it really, really simple and just try to get the most consistent performance, because I feel like people will make mistakes.”
The British-born 21-year-old, whose father is Jamaican and mother is from Barbados, now counts himself as a professional athlete after competing his Sports and Exercise Science degree at Leeds Beckett University, in May.
Sponsored by British-Jamaican musician and sauce maker Levi Roots, he chose to represent Jamaica after struggling to get into the British diving team.
Jamaica has only had one other Olympic diver, Betsy Sullivan, who participated in the 1972 Games in Munich.
In the run-up to the Games, Knight-Wisdom said he is training at least 25 hours a week with only Sundays off.
While he is keeping his eye on the final and clinching a spot in the Fina/NVC Diving World Series next year, his main goal is to enjoy the occasion, he said. Still, he admits his presence holds greater significance in breaking down stereotypes about divers.
“To see an African-American diver kind of at the top level in this sport, there’s very few of us,” he said. “Some people do still get shocked when I say I’m a diver.”
Meanwhile, China’s Wu Minxia will be making her bid to become the most decorated female Olympic diver during the Rio Games, fronting an attempt by her country to sweep all eight titles next month at the Maria Lenk Aquatics Centre.
The 30-year-old, who equalled her former diving partner Guo Jingjing’s record of four gold medals at the 2012 Olympics, will lead China’s 13-member team who are expected to dominate after winning six out of eight golds at test events in February.
They also won six of the eight titles at the London Games.
Among China’s other headline gold medal hopes are Qiu Bo, who won silver in the men’s 10m platform event in 2012, and 15-year-old Ren Qian, who scored a perfect 10 at the February test event in the women’s category.
China’s diving team leader, Zhou Jihong, has remained cautious over the country’s chances, saying that China “had no advantage in the men’s events” and warned that “dark horses” lurked in the women’s platform events.
“It is very hard. Our rivals are at high-level, very experienced and at the same time very young,” she was quoted by Xinhua news agency as saying about the men’s events in May.
The major competition for the Chinese men are the United States’ David Boudia, who will defend his 10m platform gold at his third Olympics, and Britain’s Tom Daley, who took the bronze in London.
Wu, however, will not be defending her individual 3m springboard gold and will instead compete in the synchronised event with team-mate Shi Tingmao.
North Korea will also be pinning their medal hopes on teenager Kim Kuk-hyang in the women’s 10m event after she won her country’s first gold at last year’s world championships.
While China dominated the test event, there are concerns that weather changes at the outdoor venue, especially during Brazil’s winter, could affect divers’ performances. The venue also suffered temporary power cuts during recent competitions.
At a panel late last year titled “Is London Too Rich to be Interesting?” Saatchi-approved sculpture pioneer Gavin Turk, now 48-years old, was asked a simple question by an audience member: “If you had your time again, from now, in this London—with no grant, and no time to spend swimming around for patrons—how would you do it? Would you still be here? Would you stay?” Prior to that, he’d indulged the audience with stories about how a glorious and multi-faceted London of times past had given him the opportunities, freedom and inspiration he needed to explore his art and self, and become who he is, but he can’t help stutter on this question for some time, before coming to a long winded conclusion which I’ll simplify here: No, probably not actually.
Things have never been easy for creative types in the city, that's kind of the point. But they've also never been this bad until very recently. Only in the late 90s into early 2000s, the city was fostering multiple vibrant music scenes, each one representative of the young people that fuelled it: from grime in Bow, to indie in Camden, to dubstep in Croydon, to artrock in New Cross. To have that many young people all maintaining so many seperate, vibrant and concurrent scenes in London now seems impossible.
London used to offer artists a means to flourish, which was why it would always be uttered on the same subcultural whispers as New York and Berlin. By hook or by crook, musicians could not only eat, live and work, but also make enough to record, buy equipment, tour van gas, expenses, managers, CDs, drugs, pot noodles. There was cheap housing if you had the balls to rough it out (it often came with rats, shit landlords and toilets that coughed sewage, free of charge). Recording studios could be found in the middle of town that hadn’t yet been forced to close, or pander their diaries and costings to big money block bookings—so a young band or artist could get a few hours in front of a half decent mixing desk for not an unrealistic price, without going on mythological quests to Zone 8. The city even had a visible ladder of progression, its venues would guide a rise, all the way from shithole basement to 200 cap club to decent sized concert hall. But the most important thing the city had was time. Obviously there was no eternal well of opportunity for workshyshitbags, but it wasn’t so unrealistic for an aspiring musician to work three or four days a week in a dive bar, and spend the rest on building their dream. An artistic balance could be achieved, where your work was just work and your talent was your focus, without simply consigning yourself to waste.
Is Tropical were one of many bands who took advantage of the city’s charms and loopholes, throwing their dice at London’s heaving squat scene around 2007. “When we discovered living in squats was doable, it was perfect,” explains lead singer Simon Milner. “Suddenly, everyone had the time to get on with what they loved. If you just have to work for rent then you have to work five days a week, but as an artist, you have to buy your equipment too, whether it's paints, instruments, or jewelry. It’s expensive, so an opportunity to live for free, yeah, in horrible conditions, was vital.”
Photo provided by Is Tropical.
Their now famous South London squat was called The Toilet Factory, and homed themselves, Shitdisco (together, then known as Ratty Rat Rat), and The Metros (some of whom went on to become Fat White Family). It was one of many in the city; including others like the notorious Squally Oaks, which housed early formations of Metronomy, !WowoW! squat in Peckham, and also 78 Lyndhurst Way.
“Down in South London there was a load of us. A lot of artists like Matthew Stone, the writer Karley Sciortino. So it was a really big scene. From the outside it probably looked like everyone was just wasters, but that’s where you socialized, collaborated, and made your connections.”
South London band Breton utilised a guardianship scheme for the first part of their career, where tenants are welcomed into otherwise abandoned buildings for next to nothing, to basically keep the building’s blood pumping. They landed themselves in an old bank in Elephant & Castle, which they dubbed BretonLABs. "It was like Stalingrad most of the time," they tell me, and they all slept in a wedding marquee with electric heaters in the center of the space. "When we got signed, we bought massive coats” says lead singer Roman.
Members of London band Breton, on the roof of their South London squat
Still, it was a place they could live, film, and record for next to nothing. Another girl in their building ran her theater company from home, stacking her space with props. A different tenant was the filmmaker Ian Pons Jewell, who’s now an esteemed director, he made the video for Naughty Boy's "La La La" and scooped the 2013 MOBOs and Best Director at the UK Music Video Awards as a result.
But in 2012, the Conservative government made squatting in a residential building in England and Wales a criminal offence. What was previously a civic matter, became a police matter, meaning people could be rapidly evicted. An old bank in the middle of Elephant & Castle might not sound like a residential building, but because one small room was once deemed the bank manager’s sleeping quarters (in the 80s), it was enough to get the whole building classed as "residential," and Breton, plus 15 other residents, were evicted so it could be demolished. There’s something poetically cyclical about how such a capitalist construct, as an in-office living space made for bankers to ensure they work excessive hours into the night, was still managing to do its bit for inequality, even in its dilapidated state.
Men holding stacks of cash at Breton's bank, back when it was actually a bank in the 80s.
The decimation of London’s art squats is a metaphor for the city’s recalibrated attitude towards art, and 2015 London has all the spluttering symptoms of a city hurtling towards cultural void. Investors pick up housing estates as if they’re glass ketchup bottles, turning them upside down and smacking the bottom until all the inhabitants fall out. Wages have stagnated, living costs have soared, rents have rocketed, venues are being methodically demolished, 150,000 of us are working two jobs, and everyone with a creative one is considering a move to Woodford.
Over in the fallows of central London, bankers body pump to “Everybody’s Free” at morning raves, each new bead of sweat more resinous than the previous, as last night’s cocaine residue is taxied out of their bloodstream. The same month London Mayor Boris Johnson launches his#BackBusking campaign, his police force are heavy handedly arresting musicians in broad daylight for doing just that in Leicester Square.
We’re told to tolerate this, and that it is a means to an end because—grin emoji, thumbs up emoji—London’s output growth is BETTER THAN EVER! The problem is, the burgeoning riches of a city don’t necessarily correlate with its art and creativity. Cities like Lisbon, where new strands of Afro-Portuguese electronic music seem to sprout every six months, or Atlanta, where trap has supernova’d in every direction, aren’t teeming with invention because of a influx of billionares, high density penthouse monoculture or chains of cold brewed coffee shops. Berlin's progressive arts scene is in part thanks to the progressive politics that frame it, and they've addressed their soaring costs by becoming the first German city to introduce rent capping. So, it’s no surprise that in London, the unhindered boom in the city’s wealth hasn’t exactly chimed with an explosion of subculture and youth movements. You only need to look at the cities London is now mentioned alongside: digested baked bean shells like Singapore, or sanitized 1-percenter city-state toy towns like Monaco, to get a feel for its aspirational trajectory. Tell me, who was the last shit hot beatmaker from Monaco you faved on Soundcloud? These days, for most normal musicians to survive London’s demands, their employment must become their everything, their music: a mere hobby.
“In the last few years,” explains Roman of Breton, who coped with the demolition of their bank by moving to, you guessed it, Berlin. “They have done their best to paint these pictures of crusty squatters, who go and smash up these buildings, but it’s not like that. Yeah, we were basically living like heroin addicts without the perks of heroin. But that made the band possible! All the things that a Londoner had to pay for, that could really attack our time and freedom, we felt liberated from.”
The godfather of reggae will live again when Marley has its world premiere at Center Stage in Baltimore next month.
Written and directed by award-winning British playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah (Elmina's Kitchen), the new musical featuring songs by Bob Marley tells the story of a pivotal moment of his life in the late 1970s, when he returned to Jamaica after two years of self-imposed exile in London following an assassination attempt. The show uses events surrounding that homecoming to chronicle the musician's transformation into a 20th century cultural icon.
The project marks the first time that Marley's songs have been featured onstage in a biographical context. The musical includes, among others, songs from the albums Exodus, Kaya and Rastaman Vibration, written during the period when the story is set.
The title role will be played by Mitchell Brunings, who became a YouTube sensation after performing Marley's songs on the Dutch version of The Voice.
The cast also includes Broadway regular Saycon Sengbloh (Motown: The Musical, Fela!) as Rita Marley; Mykal Kilgore as Stevie Wonder, Krystal Joy Brown as backup singer Judy Mowatt; and Ano Okero as producer and filmmaker Don Letts. Other real-life figures portrayed in the show include Peter Tosh(Michael Luwoye), Island Records founder Chris Blackwell (John Patrick Hayden),Bunny Wailer (Damian Thompson), Marley's art director Neville Garrick (Jaime Lincoln Smith) and Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley(Howard W. Overshown).
The production features music direction by Jason Webb, choreography byGermaul Barnes, scenic design by Neil Patel and costumes by ESosa.
Suzette Newman and Blackwell are producing for Stageplay. The Baltimore engagement runs May 7 through June 14, and while no plans for the project have been announced beyond the premiere, theater insiders are speculating about a future commercial life in New York or London if Marley is well-received.
The London Int’l Ska Festival returns to the capital this Easter (2-5 April) for a series of 21 unique events at famed and iconic London venues. The festival, which launched in 1988, celebrates all things ska, from it’s roots in rhythm and blues, mento and calypso, through it’s Jamaican originators and onto rocksteady, reggae, dub, 2 Tone, skapunk and beyond. Amongst the 50+ acts this years headliners include; Lee Scratch Perry, Steel Pulse (performing their classic Handsworth Revolution album), Derrick Harriott, Twinkle Brothers, Gentleman’s Dub Club, Dennis Bovell, Rico Rodriguez MBE, Freddie ‘Montego Bay’ Notes, Bitty Mclean, Pama International, Horace Panter (The Specials), Rhoda Dakar (The Bodysnatchers/Special AKA), Don Letts, Zion Train plus acts from France, USA, Japan, Malta, Italy, Jamaica, Mexico and all over the UK.
In addition to the wealth of live talent the festival also features the now infamous LISF Thames cruise onboard the beautiful Dixie Queen paddle steamer, and a 3 day ‘From Kingston to Camden’ art, music and fashion exhibition, UK premiere of the ‘Legends of Ska’ film at the British Film Industry, the launch of the stand-alone Trojan Records Clothing collection, a free family day in the heart of Camden, and much more!
Every year festival goers fly in from the four-corners of the globe. From Auckland to Buenos Aires, Moscow to Toronto, Tokyo to Chicago, Stockholm to Sydney, Paris, Rome and beyond people come to celebrate the wonderful world of ska in all it’s colourful guises,
COME next month, 18 Jamaican high schools will vie for the opportunity to tour the United Kingdom in 2016 to showcase their Jamaican adaptation of plays by William Shakespeare.
The unique venture, launched in February at the British High Commission, is the brainchild of Generating Genius founder, Dr Tony Sewell, and sponsored by the Jamaica National Building Society (JNBS).
The year-long, school-based competition, to run from March 2015 to March 2016, will comprise a series of regional rounds across the island and a grand final in Kingston, where the winning school will receive an all-expenses-paid tour of the UK, in celebration of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death.
"The winning Jamaican school will tour schools in London, Birmingham and Manchester, inspiring British children to understand Shakespeare and see him through the lens of Jamaica. They will get a chance to perform at Stratford upon-Avon, the birthplace of Shakespeare, and join the International Shakespeare Festival with students from across the world," said Sewell.
Shakespeare, who is widely regarded as the world's pre-eminent dramatist, often features as compulsory reading for students who study Literatures in English across the world, including students sitting Literatures in English in Jamaica and the English-speaking Caribbean at the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate examination. The championship, however, is geared at broadening students' exposure by allowing them to participate in and view productions of Shakespeare.
According to Sewell, the championship is targeted to students in the 10th grade, or fourth form, but will also be open to all secondary school students at the discretion of their teachers and trainers.
The plays produced by the students will be based on abridged 30-minute versions of Shakespeare's plays, but using Jamaican themes and contexts. However, the language of the plays will be maintained. Local audiences will be treated to shows from three participating schools in each regional round.
The project has been endorsed and is being supported by the Ministry of Youth and Culture, the Ministry of Education, the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission and the Edna Manley College for the Visual and Performing Arts.
Earl Jarrett, JNBS general manager said the competition is an important venture that will have an impact on the growth of the young people and by consequence, the country.
"The arts play an important part in our advancement and is a central part of development," he said noting his organisation's continued commitment to nation-building through education.
"The arts is a natural part of Jamaica's cultural dispensation and was important to the development of critical thinking. We anticipate that this competition will not only promote a better appreciation for classical literature, but that it will assist students with sharpening their analytical skills, as well as in speaking to different audiences and understanding how to adapt works and information to suit varying contexts," said Jarrett.
Speaking at the launch, Education Minister Ronald Thwaites added that the arts "should not be left behind."
"Education is critical to the development we hope to achieve and, therefore, in our emphasis on science, technology, engineering and math we also have to emphasise the arts," he said.
Sewell said although the competition centres on Shakespeare's plays, the themes, plots and use of language will be very Jamaican.
"Shakespeare wrote his plays to be understood by ordinary people and to help broaden their level of thinking. It is only in recent times that his works have been linked to the elite. Shakespeare would have been at home in Jamaica, as his plays also include tales of 'duppies' and people speaking to each other using poetic imagery. There are class struggles, revenge and lots of 'mix-up' business. I like to say that Shakespeare was really a Jamaicans"
Christopher Nolan has started filming his latest Batman film in London.
Warner Bros. Pictures says principal photography began this week on The Dark Knight Rises, the conclusion to Nolan's Batman trilogy.
Film crew and blacked-out cars were spotted at night near Charter House Square in the capital, where fans in Batman t-shirts flocked in the hope of getting autographs.
A bystander said: "We've seen people in American cop uniforms going in and out so I reckon they're filming Gotham City night scenes in there."
The film will also be shot in India, Scotland and the American cities of New York, Los Angeles and Pittsburgh.
Christian Bale returns as Bruce Wayne and Batman. Michael Caine, Gary Oldman and Morgan Freeman are also returning to the cast. Newcomers for the third installment in the franchise include Anne Hathaway, Marion Cotillard, Tom Hardy and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
Joseph, Tom and Marion also appeared in Nolan's 2010 film Inception.
The Dark Knight Rises is slated for release in July next year.
Photo via 
Photo provided by Is Tropical.
Members of London band Breton, on the roof of their South London squat
Men holding stacks of cash at Breton's bank, back when it was actually a bank in the 80s.