Gombey Festival Honouree, October 12, 2019
At 47 years old, Shawn Caisey is already recognized as an elder in Bermuda’s Gombey community having taken up his hatchet as a warrior as a young child.
He grew up in the heart of gombey country – Pembroke’s Glebe Road neighbourhood, where he was raised by his grandmother Olga Desent Butterfield and aunt Percylin Butterfield. As a child he lived for those moments when a gombey troupe would start up and make its rounds, and with many other children would roam with the troupes as far as he could – only returning home when he found himself in unfamiliar territory.
While neither of his parents were gombeys, Nana Olga was from St. Kitts and, familiar with the masquerade culture there, wasted no time in agreeing to a request by Leon “Sparky” Place that six year old Shawn join his gombey troupe. “Sparky” and his son Andre would become early influencers as well as Tyrone Nesbitt, Greg Place and others. From these he would learn discipline and a respect for the culture.
By the time he was a teenager, Shawn had risen to the rank of captain, and had moved on to H&H where Lawrence Hendrickson took him under his wing and furthered his knowledge and practice.
More than 2,000 young boys have been privileged to have come under his tutelage and he has created hundreds of regalia’s and too many drums to count.
As is typical of Bermuda’s master gombeys, Shawn is an expert regalia designer, drum maker and, of course, dancer. He has made simple but important innovations in the design of the headgear – ensuring that his more than three dozen dancers can keep moving indefinitely without it falling off. And his choreographic skills have afforded spectators a unique experience when his dancers hit the streets.
Today, he cuts a distinctive figure when he dances with his beloved H & H – carrying an intricately carved cane instead of a whip. The cane is his way of marking his status as an elder and supervisor of the captains leading the other dancers.
Throughout his career he has performed in front of royalty and represented Bermuda in the Caribbean, North America and Europe.
Shawn also became a keen researcher of the history and origins of gombey culture, while still a teenager, and is a proud bearer of the tradition passed down to us by our ancestors.
Motivated by the many questions his peers asked him and guided by cultural gurus Gary Phillips and the late Louise Jackson, he would often be seen at the Bermuda National Library studying up about the gombeys and other masquerade cultures in the Caribbean and Africa.
Shawn has no doubts about the responsibility he carries as a gombey leader.
“You have to be a role model. Because you’re setting an example. I keep that strict because it goes right back to our slavery days. We’re representing our ancestors. Everything they went through – we have to respect that.”
