On Saturday 3rd October, ’09 Crawley Happy Times had the privilege of attending the Celebration evening for the start of Crawley Black History Month.
In the foyer we were greeted by a couple of stands depicting various causes. On the first, we were greeted by Steve Innes of Crawley Fair Trade Group who are encouraging Crawley to be a fair trade town. You can see more on this here…
Steve Innes at The Black History Month event
Secondly, we met a couple displaying Senegal pieces from West Africa which consisted of hand crafted wooden objects which are ethically traded. You can read more on this here…
With an array of colourful outfits and smiling excited faces, the performers patiently waited backstage practising their acts. We decided to spend most of our visit behind the scenes, getting a insight into the perfomers and relishing in the excited anticipation. All performers, whether individual or as a group, were very professional and always happy to speak to us.
Firstly we spoke to Kelly Etchells who invited Crawley Happy Times to follow her on this wonderful journey. Kelly was accompanied by two beautiful backing singers, Angelina Treva Riley and Becka Jae and a team of amazing dancers. Kelly has a voice that is strong and powerful, lending itself well to any performance or style of music.
Next we met Amy. Amy is well known in Crawley for her brilliant renditions, mixing a strong singing voice with rap. This mixture of singing styles has catapulted Amy’s reputation as a well known artist, which we have no doubt will take her places in the future. Amy was accompanied by David on accoustics and a support rap artist Zeth.
Rishi was our next port of call. Rishi is a modest 13 year old local lad who has so much talent, I think it will take a few years for the full extent of Rishi’s talent to be seen in it’s glory. We first met Rishi at the Connect ’09 event in Langley Green. You can watch a video of Rishi on the Connect ’09 CHT write up, also on our Youtube account, The Crawley Happy Times. Rishi was sitting quietly waiting his turn to perform. We asked Rishi if he was nervous to which he replied “no” 
Sharing a room with Amy, we met Aiesha who looked stunning in a beautiful white dress. Aiesha is a spoke word poet. Aiesha told us she teaches hairdressing at Crawley College but has been a spken word poet for a while but not in public or on stage. We wished Aiesha luck in her first performance, which she didn’t really need
Following the loud, atmospheric, ambient noise coming from one of the rooms, we popped our heads in to be greeted (in a very warm and inviting fashion) by the Diego Garcia Dancers. The colourful energy that exuded from this amazing group of individuals was electrofying. All beaming from ear to ear they told us they were very excited about performing. Later in the evening we snatched five minutes with Carolyn Murphy, Arts Development Officer, who along with her colleague Joanne Joseph form the Community Arts Team. Carolyn told us how much respect and admiration she had for this group of individuals after they had suffered such loss and how they had grown fruitfully in the face of diversity. Now that might be something worth looking into some more…
Finally we visited the last room which housed the local company, Stages Performing Arts led by Carol Black. All dressed up in some extremely gruesome outfits, the dance company were about to perform a rendition of Michael Jackson’s Thriller. We left quite rapidly as it really was quite scary to be amongst them. They looked amazingly real.
We were very honoured to be able to speak to the performers from behind the scenes and hope we have given you an insight into the evening which was not portrayed by other media’s. We will let the videos tell you the rest, enjoy :-)
Crawley Happy Times would like to extend a special thank you to Kelly for inviting us to come along for the ride, and to Craig Sanderson who worked very hard on putting the videos together, and what a great job Craig did Craig is available for photography and video shoots, so please contact us for further details.
VIDEOS
