At Idakeda we create multi-disciplinary cultural interventions for a variety of local and international audiences.

Idakeda was formed in 1998 by actor/choreographer Dara E. Healy, to promote and protect the theatrical, poetic and other writings of Ms. Springer. Since then, we have worked towards fulfilling our guiding statement ‘Changing Communities through Culture’.

Poet, playwright Eintou Pearl Springer is Idakeda’s Creative Force and writer/cultural consultant Attillah Springer is a Director.

We are the producers of critically acclaimed plays such as ‘Baby Doll Meets Midnight Robber’, ‘I Hyarima’ and ‘Freedom Morning Come’, all written and directed by national cultural icon, Eintou Springer.

Our premier event is the annual staging of Kambule on Carnival Friday morning. This key production on the Carnival calendar is the genesis of much of our training and collaborative work with such organisations as the UWIDCFA, UTT, Bois Academy, and a number of community cultural organisations.

Our organisation comprises the non-profit NGO, ICAN the Indigenous Creative Arts Network, African Legacy & Tours of Trinidad & Tobago and the Chibale Drumming Ensemble.

The Indigenous Creative Arts Network – ICAN.

ICAN is dedicated to furthering the education, self-esteem and marketability of marginalised young people through culture, heritage and the arts. We have developed our own cultural techniques to conduct interventions for vulnerable youth and communities, as well as to deliver culturally-driven Training Programmes. These programmes are made available to the corporate sector, non-governmental organisations, community based groups and government institutions.

African Legacy & Tours of Trinidad & Tobago

African Legacy & Tours was established to sensitise citizens, residents abroad and foreign visitors about our rich African heritage. Some of the sites we visit are featured in the book ‘African Heritage Sites in Trinidad and Tobago’, written by Eintou Springer. This book was developed with the support of the T&T government to welcome a contingent from the US based Travel Professionals of Colour – TPOC. Our tours focus on giving recognition and visibility to the contribution of peoples of African descent to the social and cultural matrix of our country. This is therefore a critical part of the educational aspect of our work.

Zanté – Carnival and Theatre Arts vacation camp

Zanté means to show-off in the Patois language tradition of Trinidad & Tobago. The annual Zanté vacation camp for children is dedicated to preserving our Carnival Arts and building self-esteem through theatre, movement and other creative vehicles. We also ensure that spaces are made available at the camp for underprivileged children. By taking part in this enjoyable experience, we want to encourage children to zanté themselves by learning as much as they can about our Carnival Arts, and contributing to the protection and sustainability of indigenous artforms.

Meet the team!

Creative force Eintou Pearl Springer  A.L.A.UK; M.Phil. Lon.

Eintou Springer is the recipient of a national award, the Humming Bird Silver Medal, for her contribution to the development and propagation of Arts and Culture.

An award-winning actress, Dr. Springer held the title of Poet Laureate of Port of Spain from 2002-2009. She is also one of the most prolific female playwrights of Trinidad and Tobago and the Caribbean. Her plays have been performed internationally to critical acclaim. They focus primarily on the heritage and culture of her birthplace, Trinidad and Tobago. From ‘Harmony in Diversity’ to ‘Kambule’, ‘Sesa Woruban’ and ‘Baby Doll meets Midnight Robber’, they contain authentic historical information and facts. This ensures that her plays are not only educational, but they reveal aspects of the indigenous culture of Trinidad and Tobago which may still be unexplored.

She conceptualised and managed the Junior Best Village programme for three years. In 2004, she was awarded the Vanguard Award of the National Drama Association of Trinidad and Tobago (NDATT), an organisation that she helped to form. In 2018, she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts by the University of Trinidad & Tobago (UTT).

Founder – Dara E. Healy, MA Mass Comm.

Dara’s main passion as an artist is dance, but she is also an actress and storyteller. She is the recipient of the 2011 University of the West Indies (U.W.I) Felix Harrington prize for Dance. Additionally, she loves to write and has turned her pen to poetry, prose and other types of creative writing over the years. She is an experienced Communications Specialist, and has been a columnist with the T&T Newsday since 2015.

As an actress, she began her acting career on the stage, performing in plays such as ‘Shango Tales of the Orisas’ and ‘Shades of I-She’ which toured Trinidad & Tobago and the Caribbean. In 2017, she expanded her range as an actress to the genre of film, receiving excellent reviews for her performance as Ma Lammy in the critically acclaimed Green Days by the River.

Dara has toured locally, regionally and internationally with Idakeda Productions as a dancer, choreographer and manager, and is actively involved at a community level with all the programmes of the organisation. She works with the Idakeda team to conduct interventions for vulnerable populations, and she draws on her experience in Communications to create unique training and development programmes for NGOs, CBOs, government and the private sector.

Director – Attillah Springer

Attillah Springer has written and curated content for television, print, radio and digital for the past 20 years, focusing on themes of culture and memory.

She has presented papers and written commissioned work on traditional mas, marronage, African spirituality in England, Brazil, Nigeria and Haiti. She is also one of the conveners of ‘Say Someting’ – a Trinidad-based media advocacy and coalition group working on issues of gender-based discrimination.
She has a longstanding interest in social justice movements and has organized and taken part in events around industrialisation versus sustainability in Trinidad, England, Iceland and India since 2005, using Carnival and other indigenous festival arts as forms of protest or awareness building.
She also is one of the conveners of the Wajang Diskotheque, an event based collaborative arts project bringing together filmmakers, musicians, visual artists.

Our Strengths:

• DEEP CONNECTION TO TRADITIONAL AFRICAN SPIRITUALITY
• RIGOROUS HISTORICAL RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS
• GLOBAL CULTURAL NETWORKS
• EXPERIENCE – MORE THAN THREE DECADES
• CONSISTENT INNOVATION
• TRACK RECORD OF DELIVERY

Our Vision:

‘CHANGING COMMUNITIES THROUGH CULTURE’

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