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Dave Cooper, artist shows his students how to form a wireman for their steelpan character at the Wireman Initiative pilot class at the Carnival Museum of Trinidad and Tobago on the corner of Duke and Charlotte Street, Port of Spain on November 27, 2025. - Photo by Faith AyoungFOR nearly two decades, visual arts teacher Dave Cooper kept running into the same troubling gap. Children could tell him when Carnival was, which band they wanted to play with and who was the Road March winner the year before.
But when he asked them what Carnival was – where it came from, how its elements worked together, its cultural relevance to people – the answers were less than satisfactory.
That disconnect is what led Cooper, 47, to create the Wireman Initiative, an immersive cultural-education project that blends wire-bending, recycled materials, music technology and Carnival history into a hands-on learning experience.
He developed the Wireman Initiative to teach “the basics of the steelpan, mas and calypso” through a 90-minute class in which participants construct a “wireman” and transform it into a miniature pan player.
The initiative was tested during a two-day pilot in November 2025. Cooper said the response was overwhelming, as it opened participants’ eyes to the culture.
Each class begins with a 15-minute lecture and video presentation about the origins of Trinidad Carnival and the creativity of the people at the time. Most of the information was gleaned from the material provided by his masters degree classes in Carnival Studies at UTT, as well as the Crix World Steelpan Day Tin commemorative tin which outlines the history and culture of the steelpan.
"We didn't have stores to go and buy things so we used what was around us like fibres and wire that was used all the time to bind cutlasses and garden tools. Today, we basically use the same wire to build the forms of costumes. It is the backbone of TT Carnival."
Dave Cooper, founder and lecturer shows students how to twist wire to create the hand and legs of a wireman steelpan player at a Wire Man Initiative Pilot Class and Shoot at the Trinidad and Tobago Carnival Museum on the corner of Duke and Charlotte Street, Port of Spain on 27, November 2025. - Photo by Faith Ayoung
The class centres on a deceptively simple model: a wire figure mounted on plywood, holding a pan fashioned from recycled soft drink cans and decorated according to the participant’s imagination.
But embedded in the sculpture is a QR code: when it is scanned, the model comes alive with music.
The melody is from Adidas: All Day I Dream About Soca, a song Cooper composed for the initiative, produced by M4 Studios and Bad John Republic. He said creating his own song helped him avoid intellectual-property issues, while also allowing the music to be fully integrated into the teaching process.
“It’s a multi-media, multi-pronged effort to teach young people and adults about the foundations or pillars of TT-style Carnival.
“I teach wirebending and recycling through the making of the pan. So that’s mas.
“I teach the anatomy of a steel orchestra by having people make different types of pans – tenor, double tenor, double second, double guitar, triple cello as bass.”
Each model plays the appropriate melody for that type of pan, and when placed together, they function like a steel orchestra.
Cooper developed his song Adidas: All Day I Dream About Soca while enrolled in a cultural composition class for his master’s degree in Carnival studies at UTT. Courses included Caribbean History and Civilisation, Proseminar in Ethnomusicology and Caribbean Carnival and Culture: the management, business features, development and spread of Carnival at home and aboard.
He graduated in 2022.
Hand-made steelpan characters made by artist Dave Cooper. -
“When I saw that Machel (Montano) took his homework (for his Carnival Studies master’s) and carried it to Calypso Monarch and won, I figured if he could do it, why can’t I take my homework and do something with it?”
Cooper would like to see the tune performed by a senior or junior steelband on a national stage for Panorama.
Beyond the novelty of QR-coded wiremen, Cooper is making a broader argument about education and cultural survival. He said the initiative exists because there is still no foundation for Carnival studies at the secondary-school level.
He sees that absence not just as an academic oversight, but a missed economic and cultural opportunity.
“I believe that the Carnival-studies movement can solve a lot of our problems, especially with Carnival being a multi-billion-dollar industry worldwide.
“There are no other types of Carnival spread all over the world except a Trinidad-style Carnival. Our diaspora is all over the world, spreading good vibes and good cheer.
“So why do we, who say we are the mecca, not have a formal education system in it?”
So Cooper is working to fill that gap. He is developing a proposed secondary-school curriculum for a subject he has named fetecraft, focused on creating décor for TT-style fetes. He is also writing a book, Carnival Arts Practices for Secondary Schools.
Part of that work, he said, is about restoring balance to a festival he believes has drifted too far in one direction. He hopes his work will “counterbalance the hypersexuality that has taken over TT Carnival.” Cooper said sexuality has its place in Carnival, but it is not the core of the culture, and he believes certain elements are being exploited to “weaponise” Carnival against the people of TT.
He believes education will fix it.
“We have to have something for the young people to understand the foundation of what Carnival is. So this is my gift to the nation, my efforts to try and counterbalance all of the negativity and all of these things that are getting out of hand…We have to find a way to guide it away from what inevitably will turn into a whole Brazilian-style carnival – and that’s not who we are.”
A handmade wireman steelpan character playing the steelpan (triple cello) is seen at the Wire Man Initiative pilot class at the Carnival Museum of Trinidad and Tobago on the corner of Duke and Charlotte Street, Port of Spain on November 27, 2025. - Photo by Faith Ayoung
The Wireman Initiative is expected to function as a cultural field trip for schools, with three classes a day, four days a week, at the corner of Duke and Nelson Streets in Port of Spain. Cooper hopes to begin classes in the third week of January.
The Port of Spain City Corporation is assisting with extra patrols in the area and allowing parking on the road, while Bermudez has come on board as a sponsor. He hopes the Ministries of Education and Culture and Community Development will also support the initiative, along with additional corporate partners.
The project is deeply personal for Cooper, whose relationship with Carnival began as a child.
He told Newsday he invented his own style of wireman-making at six, using a single strand of wire to create a figure without cutting it. He calls the technique Cooper’s Twist, and is in the process of registering the patent.
His mother took him to the Grand Stand at the Queen’s Park Savannah to watch mas at an early age, planting the seeds of a lifelong fascination. He would ask masqueraders for pieces of their costumes after they came off stage, taking them home to study and make his own toys and costumes, adding things he found around his home.
Cooper grew up in Cascade as the fourth of five children. After school, while waiting for his mother to finish work at the Port of Spain General Hospital so they could go home together, he would roam the city.
One afternoon, he wandered into the mas camp Showcase and Associates, and was captivated by the photographs of costumes on the walls. He kept returning, asking the artists questions and offering to help. Eventually, they began training him to make mas.
He created his first costume at nine, competed nationally in the individual category by age 12 and stopped competing around 15.
Through a friend’s father, who ran a J’Ouvert band, Cooper was drawn into another side of Carnival. He helped make the outfits, fell in love with J’Ouvert and started playing at 15. At 17, he began making costumes for his nephew instead.
He went to Trinity College and St Augustine Senior Secondary before moving on to creative careers in several disciplines, including being an illustrator and columnist at the Express’s Vox magazine at 17.
“I was into graphic arts, I was into music, I was into singing. I had a rap group. I was on Party Time, singing with some of the guys from the Love Movement. I was into fashion, art and music, especially Carnival.”
He briefly studied music before moving on to UWI, where he got a degree in visual arts in 2001. He then spent two years in Brazil developing his industrial-design skills, returning to Trinidad in 2004 to teach visual art in secondary schools while doing event-design work for Island People.
Cooper said while he was in Brazil, a local group produced and tried to claim ownership of a song he had written. He took legal action and won, but he believes the episode led to his being blacklisted in the local music industry.
The Wireman Initiative. -
As a result, he stepped away from music and focused on design instead, moving into set, stage, event and costume design by 2007.
In 2009, he founded a company called Hybrid Theory. The company has designed Carnival-related events around the world, including in St Lucia, St Vincent, Anguilla, England, New York and Florida.
Cooper has designed sets for fetes such as Soca Brainwash and Spirit Mas, the Great Race in Tobago, and Soca Monarch performances in Trinidad and across the Caribbean. Hybrid Theory is now the set designer for TTT.
However, the musical side of him recently began to resurface. He needed to release it, in a way that would inspire youths in Carnival so as to sustain development of the industry. He wants to encourage them to do something positive with their ingenuity.
“I think I’m too old now to go and jump and prance on stage and wining, especially as I’m a teacher. I cannot sing anything immoral. It has to be uplifting and positive.
“So the Wireman Initiative marries all of my talents. I have music, I have inventory skills, and so I combined it with something that has never been done before in a formal education setting. And so my aim is to become an authority on the cultural educational direction of Carnival studies in TT.”
Cooper plans to continue his academic journey in Carnival studies, and hopes to begin his doctorate soon based on the concept of "fetecraft" and his book.
For more information on the Wireman Initiative, direct message Cooper on Instagram @wiremaninitative1
English (US) ·