In His Presence 11
In His Presence 11 was staged at the Shaw Park Complex in Tobago on 19 June 2024, under the theme “Get Locked In” and billed as a celebration of worship, fun and dance.
The programme ran for close to four hours and carried eleven sets. It opened with Gabby Williams and closed with Nigerian gospel artist Tim Godfrey, whose set alone accounted for more than a third of the night. Between them came a performing arts ministry, two pastors given room to minister rather than simply perform, and a run of artists each handed a genuine slot on the bill.
Ap. Dr. Michelle Modeste hosted.
Who performed
Every set from the night, in the order it happened.
The night in review
The evening was built to climb.
It opened in prayer. The first performance came seven and a half minutes in, when Gabby Williams took the stage fronting the In His Presence band and stayed there for fourteen minutes. Sound Of Silence followed with nine.
From there the running order moved through a sequence of voices, each given a real slot rather than a token appearance. Joanna Williams took ten minutes and Shantal Lindsay fourteen. Pastor Terance Baynes followed with twelve, and MITA, the Ministry In The Arts Academy, brought six minutes of performing arts to a programme that had been almost entirely music to that point.
Pastor Josanne Dyer's nine minutes sat a little past the halfway mark of the supporting programme, placed where a spoken word tends to carry best: after the room has settled, and before the closing run.
That closing run belonged to three artists in turn. Jahzy took ten minutes, Renee Joseph Fortune fourteen, and B J'orn Pierre twenty one, the longest set on the supporting bill.
Tim Godfrey came on at two hours and fourteen minutes and played to the end, an hour and twenty seven minutes in all. That is more than a third of the entire recording, and the shape of the whole programme was built around it.
What the running order shows is a bill with real depth. Ten of the eleven sets came from the supporting programme, and together they carried more than two hours before the headline act appeared. In His Presence 11 was not an international concert with a short local warm up. It was a full programme in its own right that happened to finish with an international guest.
From the archive
The original promotional artwork for this staging.
