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Plus for tourism
7/13/2012
By Patricia Thangaraj
Barbados could soon have a famous face promoting the island in advertisements and programmes that would be seen in the US and throughout the world.
This is because Victoria Rowell, known for her portrayal of Drucilla Winters on the popular soap opera The Young and The Restless, is planning on working with the Barbados Tourism Authority (BTA) to lend her profile and her expertise to this cause. She revealed as much to members of the media yesterday at the Ministry of Family, Culture, Sports and Youth.
“I really would like to participate with the BTA in offering my personality and my persona to a tourism commercial to advocate for tourism for the beautiful island of Barbados. Additionally, offering my directorial expertise puts the two together to formulate an idea – a 30-second spot, a one-minute spot and then perhaps even a single reel of 15 seconds.”
Howell said that she believes that this is an excellent idea because the island has so much to offer.
“The reason I think that it would be beautiful is because Barbados offers not only the aquatic beauty – obviously the coast – but we have the sports element, the excitement of cricket and football, the fine arts and the pieces at the Plantation. We also include the unprecedented historical information and preservation on the island.”
She said that touring the island via public transportation allowed her to get a good understanding of the people and its culture, the food and other elements and she wants to offer her expertise to help out.
There is also an upcoming project that she is working on – a soap opera – and she would like to film some scenes here.
Rowell has already met with Acting Minister of Family, Culture, Sports and Youth, Senator Haynesley Benn and Minister of Tourism, Richard Sealy, to discuss her plans.
Rowell stated that she was pleased with the arts and culture of the island and these are things that she would like to include in her work.
“I am very much impressed by the heritage preservation that has been going on here in the island of Barbados. The historical preservation when I went up to St. Nicolas Abbey, I got a beautiful tour and I watched the film and I have never seen this kind of archival preservation of our ancestors doing the labour and building Barbados. To actually see footage from that period – I have never seen this kind of archival footage in all of my world travels. Your museums, your attention to the preservation of island art and I would like to see more of the decorative aspects of the hotels here because the artists here are extraordinary, so I am very interested in including that in the tourism commercial as well. It would be another layer of the actual commercial that I envisioned if I would be so fortunate to be awarded that opportunity.”
Having an interest in anthropology and other historical and cultural aspects of the African Diaspora, she is also interested in slave burial grounds. In this regard, she conducts anthropological research wherever she travels and would like to do the same in Barbados as well as visit some of these grounds.
“Wherever I travel, I always do anthropological research. I have a ferocious curiosity because my own history has been lost to me as a foster child and what I call an orphan of the living, never raised by my parents and having lived in the foster care system for 18 years and it made me very curious, paying attention to education and knowing other people’s history as well as my own.”
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