The National Performing Arts Centre at Newton opens on the eve of CARIFESTA XV, raising questions of memory, money, and whether culture can become the Caribbean’s true engine of growth.
On Sunday, August 17, it was reported that Phase One of the National Performing Arts Centre at Newton would be handed over the next day to the National Cultural Foundation, just in time for the opening of CARIFESTA XV. Designed by Sir David Adjaye, the structure is slated to host Ghanaian theatre production Mansa Musa and, later this month, a national tribute to Irving Burgie. It signifies progress: Barbados adding cultural infrastructure, ready to welcome the region’s premier arts festival.
The Performing Arts Centre rises in proximity to the Newton Slave Burial Ground — the hemisphere’s only undisturbed plantation burial site, containing the remains of an estimated 570 enslaved people. It is also financed by a multimillion-dollar loan. The promise is cultural infrastructure.
The Newton Burial Ground is not just another historical marker. It is a critical site of Caribbean history, a silent record of centuries of enslavement. First announced by Prime Minister Mia Mottley in December 2021, the Barbados Heritage District is meant to transform this area into a “living monument” to slavery and emancipation. The vision includes a slavery museum, a research institute, and cultural facilities — alongside the National Performing Arts Centre, a dome-shaped digital innovation hub now under construction, and the future home of the National Archives.
The district brings heritage, culture, and technology into dialogue. The juxtaposition is striking. Can remembrance coexist with modern spectacle, or risk being overshadowed by it?
Back in February, Prime Minister Mottley signed a US$75 million loan agreement with Sergio Diaz-Granados Guida, executive director of the Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean (CAF). The loan supports the Sector Wide Approach Programme (SWAP) titled Roots: From Cultural Heritage to Innovation in Barbados. Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office with responsibility for Culture, Senator Dr Shantal Munro-Knight, has emphasised that while loans typically fund physical infrastructure, this one is directed at culture — an acknowledgement that creativity itself can be a driver of national development.
That framing resonates with Barbados’ own Bridgetown Initiative, which has called for new global financial mechanisms to help small states invest in resilience and innovation. Culture, in this sense, is being tested as a form of infrastructure: as valuable to growth as roads and ports. Yet, some citizens note the absence of signage or public explanation at the site. Posts on social media ask: what is being built, and for whom? If culture is to be infrastructure, information must be treated as part of the foundation.
The opening of Phase One arrives at a symbolic moment. CARIFESTA XV brings the region’s artistes to Barbados just as the island is literally building stages beside its most sacred memory site. This is not only a cultural test, but a political one: can heritage, art, and innovation be aligned without erasure? Can a loan-funded project be leveraged into social capital rather than debt burden? And, most importantly, will the public be invited into the design — not only as audiences, but as co-authors of what this Heritage District becomes?
As Barbadians drive past Newton, what they see are cranes, domes, and unfinished walls. What they may not see are the remains of ancestors beneath the soil, the archives of a nation waiting to be housed, and the chance to chart a new model of development rooted in culture.
The National Performing Arts Centre at Newton is more than a building; it is a question posed in concrete and steel. How Barbados answers will determine whether this becomes merely another construction project, or the true foundation of a cultural future.
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