Carnival King & Queen Take Centre Stage at Marion Jones on Saturday
On Saturday night, the Marion Jones Stadium will come alive with pre-carnival sights and sounds. At seven in the night the annual King and Queen of 2018 carnival will compete for the big cash and bragging rights. There will be twenty participants in the senior and junior categories. The President of the Carnival Association Sandra Mahler says you can expect bigger, brighter and more creative costumes that are a preview of what you can expect for the Carnival Road March next week.
Sandra Mahler
Sandra Mahler, President, Belize Carnival Association
“Starting at five p.m. we will start pre-judging of King and Queen. Each Carnival band that will be participating on the road will have to send up a king and a queen to be judged. We are looking for durability of the costume. We are looking for the way they present the costume. We are looking for color coordination. So, those are only some of the things that the judges will be looking for tomorrow at King and Queen. The actual full competition starts at seven p.m.”
Andrea Polanco
“How many Kings and Queens will be participating this year?”
Sandra Mahler
“This year we have five senior kings, five senior queens, five junior kings and five junior queens. Tomorrow is going to be out of the box. An out-of-the-box edition tomorrow because last year it was high in terms of performance. People came with moveable costume doing things we didn’t think they were going to be able to do. This year, everybody is trying to compete against that. And the people who came with that type of costume last year is even doing much better than what they did last year. So, tomorrow you need to come out and you are going to see what these band leaders are doing with their different costumes. It is going to be amazing to showcase their costumes and what they have done with it. We have maximum security, back stage passes, we have the entire bleachers where you can sit. And what we are going to do this time, we are not going on a stage. We are going to be using the platform so from every angle of the stadium you will be able to see everything clearly. So that is the improvement we have made this year for the King and Queen Competition.”
The seniors will take seven thousand dollars for first place, while the juniors will win four thousand for the top spot. The costs of tickets are ten dollars for adults and five dollars for children at the Marion Jones Sporting Complex.
