STORY · GLOBAL
Beaches, ovals and lawns: where the dance actually happened
Well supported
The Jamaican stage is usually open to the sky - a beach, a sports oval, a plantation lawn.
From Spanish Town's Prison Oval to Negril's Seven Mile Beach and St Ann's festival lawn, the island's venues are mostly outdoors.
A stage open to the sky
Jamaica's most famous venues rarely have a roof. The dance happens on the sand, on a cricket field, on a lawn cut into a hillside. Nothing captures it better than Prison Oval in Spanish Town, where Barrington Levy's 'Prison Oval Rock' - first cut as a Volcano dubplate - turned a sports ground beside the correctional centre into legend, with inmates said to have danced on the roof.
The west coast runs on beach stages. In Negril, Alfred's Ocean Palace and Bourbon Beach have kept nightly live reggae on the Seven Mile Beach for decades, while on the St Catherine coast Hellshire and Fort Clarence carry the Sunday sound-system tradition.
Give Jamaica a beach, an oval or a lawn, and it will build a stage on it.
The big festivals inherited the open-air logic. Rebel Salute moved to the seaside lawn of Grizzly's Plantation Cove in St Ann; Reggae Sumfest fills Catherine Hall in Montego Bay; and Oracabessa's James Bond Beach turns a peninsula into a concert bowl. The roof, when there is one, is the night.