Great Balls of Fire

There are no words for the kind of art for which there are no comparables. The kind of art that makes you stop. Makes you stare and just keep drinking with your eyes until your brain is drunk on it all.

This is what it’s like at Aragorn’s Studio, which has been an island institution here for as long as I’ve been coming (25 years now!), and it never disappoints.

This place is a singularity, undiminished by the fact that it’s all produced on a tiny island in an out-of-the-way nook in the Caribbean.

Who sculpts in metal, creates it as a story, forms it as a sphere, and then lights it on fire?

That would be no one. Zero people.

So keep in mind when you see this on Beef Island that you are actually seeing something that only happens once, and you will not see anything comparable to this again.

The Full Moon Festival

In addition to flaming metal balls, they provide incredible local cuisine like goat curries, jerk chicken, plantains over spiced black beans.

There are also “Mako Jumbies”, which are dancers in colorful costumes up on stilts. They are so fun and add to the local Carib ambiance of this place. There’s also a ballerina-like performance, by a young woman on a suspended metal ring. Far more artful than the “who let the dogs out” soundtrack she performs to, she represents someone you see who is far more graceful and relevant than the stage on which she performs.

In this video, I’ve put some more appropriate music to accompany the talent she provides to this festival.

What’s Happened Since

We went to the full moon festival with the amazing friends we love, each month until we had to leave the Caribbean for Bermuda. In that time, we saw new bars open up beside Aragorn’s Studio, clearly siphoning off the people coming to the full moon festival at Aragorn’s.

They do offer louder music, along with bargain buckets of Corona and plenty of deep fried tourist food.

So if you’re heading to this full moon party with a fratboy friend, or someone who is so like totally stoked about the cheap alcohol, you can leave them at the neighboring bars and head over to the Studio, see the art they produce, pick up some local curries, jerk chicken, and plantains. After you dance with the jumbies, you can wag your bedraggled friends home after they’ve consumed their bodyweight in Corona next door.

Everybody wins!