The Children’s Teeth in Guyana I – Georgetown
Nico on Sep 06 2008 at 12:53 pm | Filed under: CARIFESTA, Productions, Ringplay Productions
When I attended the meeting of the Regional Cultural Committee in Georgetown in April, Guyana’s CARIFESTA Secretariat promised us that each segment of every contingent would perform four times in Guyana — twice in Georgetown and twice outside the city. The regional Directors of Culture (who comprise the RCC) were not surprisingly sceptical. But I have to give props to Guyana — they kept their word. Everyone who could be was scheduled four times — not everyone performed four times, as not every venue was suitable. But the cast and crew of The Children’s Teeth rose to the occasion, and performed.
Queen’s College, Georgetown
QC Auditorium from the outside
Queen’s College, we were told, is the second best school in Guyana, the best being the Anna Regina Multilateral School in Essequibo. The thing is, though (we were told) Queen’s College attracts the best students, because it’s a day school, it’s in Georgetown, and children can live with their parents. Anna Regina is a boarding school and is up the Atlantic Coast at the mouth of the Essequibo River. That being said, Queen’s College has an auditorium with a lot of seating capacity and a great big stage. As a result, the QC Auditorium was the main staging site for The Children’s Teeth in Georgetown.
A view of the sound equipment, at the back of the hall, with a bit of the hall included
When we arrived there, we had to build the set. It was raining that morning, pouring down, and the auditorium has a tin roof that leaks sometimes. We got there, picked our way through the mud outside, and began working on the set. The stage was big, bigger than the Dundas stage, but had no backstage or dressing rooms. Someone had set up a tent outside (shades of the Centre for the Performing Arts) for a backstage, but the rain had battered that to the earth and the ground underneath it was soggy and impossible to use. So Philip and Terrance set about creating a backstage using the set itself.
A view of the stage before the set was built
The first thing they did was reassemble the set. It made it, having been rescued from the container and having been sent on the cargo plane, and Terrance and Philip and I arrived at QC at 8:00 (a.m.) to begin building it. The morning was wet — underwater, I said on Blogworld — with intermittent heavy rain. The roof of the auditorium is corrugated iron, so that when the rain fell heavily it was deafening, so as Philip built the set he muttered that if it rained that night the show would not go on. A little rain wouldn’t hurt — the play takes place in August rainstorms, and the roof of the house in question is leaking — but a lot would make it impossible for the actors to be heard.
Below are shots of the set being assembled.
Terrance putting the house together, with the auditorium in the background
Philip and Terrance put the walls together
The rain stopped by mid-morning, leaving mud and a soggy ground behind. Georgetown, I learned later, is below sea level, and is surrounded by rivers — the Demerara to the west and the Berbice to the east. Its fertility — so good for growing sugar cane, hence the rum and the Demerara Gold sugar (the real thing is so much better than the fake, reprocessed, molasses-infused variety) — comes from being on a river delta (New Orleans comes to mind) but the ground is boggy, and water is never very far away. Every parcel of land is surrounded by ditches, drainage to keep the land dry and the water where it’s wanted. Even the auditorium at QC is surrounded by a drainage gutter, which would be fine if the rain hadn’t fallen all day long.
View of the grounds through the stage door
The set was finished by midday, when the sun came out and shone weakly — thankfully, otherwise the hall would get too hot — and I went out and picked up a quick lunch for myself and the set builders. The cast arrived at 2 for their first rehearsal on the set. The afternoon heated up, but the rain held off, and the run-through took place in steamy heat. The technicians arrived around 2 as well, and set up the lighting system — two trees with two lights each, and a spot high up on each side platform, run by a lights-up-lights-down board (fading was possible but caused feedback with the sound system, so was used sparingly) — and the sound system — a CD player, a mixer, and a couple of free-standing speakers. I ran the lights from the script in the computer, and didn’t actually run them until the evening came.
Running the lights from the computer script
There were no dressing rooms, only a bathroom that was part of the school and auditorium complex, and while there was decent water pressure earlier in the day, it faded in the evening to a mere trickle that dripped onto fingers and took forever to refill toilet tanks.
But the audience came out nevertheless. The night was hot, and Derek Walcott was speaking elsewhere, and we were in a high school auditorium, but the Guyanese people came out to the play. And the hall was so live that it was hard to understand what people said — especially those people whose voices are already big, like Kennedy or who are so very natural on stage that all their words slurred into one another by the echo, like Leah and Dion — but the people came out to the play, and they got it. And the next night, even more people came, and were moved, some of them, to tears by the play. Guyana TV filmed it and replayed it during CARIFESTA, and the producer interviewed us as well.
All in all? The experience was an excellent one.
