Popularity
Since the festival is held around the time of Dominicas Independence celebrations, patrons and visitors to the island are afforded numerous opportunities to sample the local cuisine and get an appreciation of the rich cultural attributes of The Nature Island. The popularity of the festival is seen through the rapid growth in the number of patrons attracted each year since 1997, hailing from North America, the French Caribbean, the USVI's, the UK and from OECS and CARICOM countries. From an initial 10,000 paid patrons at the first production, the festival witnessed a total attendance of well over 25,000 in 1999. This has meant a subsequent increase in hotel occupancy, government taxes, visitor expenditure, and important linkages to the various sub-sectors of the tourism industry, including the restaurant, transportation, art and craft among others.
Read more about this topic: World Creole Music Festival
Famous quotes containing the word popularity:
“Here also was made the novelty ‘Chestnut Bell’ which enjoyed unusual popularity during the gay nineties when every dandy jauntily wore one of the tiny bells on the lapel of his coat, and rang it whenever a story-teller offered a ‘chestnut.’”
—Administration for the State of Con, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“The popularity of disaster movies ... expresses a collective perception of a world threatened by irresistible and unforeseen forces which nevertheless are thwarted at the last moment. Their thinly veiled symbolic meaning might be translated thus: We are innocent of wrongdoing. We are attacked by unforeseeable forces come to harm us. We are, thus, innocent even of negligence. Though those forces are insuperable, chance will come to our aid and we shall emerge victorious.”
—David Mamet (b. 1947)
“A more problematic example is the parallel between the increasingly abstract and insubstantial picture of the physical universe which modern physics has given us and the popularity of abstract and non-representational forms of art and poetry. In each case the representation of reality is increasingly removed from the picture which is immediately presented to us by our senses.”
—Harvey Brooks (b. 1915)