Creating a Festival – Prologue
Ringplay on Aug 22 2009 at 1:08 pm | Filed under: Festivals, Shakespeare in Paradise
The idea for a theatre festival has been knocking around in Ringplay’s repertoire for the better part of 10 years. I’ve blogged about it here already, so no need to go into all of that. It’s become a reality, though, because it was time.
In our country, where we welcome millions of tourists annually (from the 1.2 million who stop over to the almost 4 million who come on cruises), where we have no indigenous entertainment to offer those visitors, you’d think that it might be a national priority to develop activities that would attract attention, keep that attention, and — more to the point — keep those tourists coming back for more.
Well, in theory, that’s a good idea. But in practice? Another story. We often rely on our government to take the lead in this sort of thing. In this case, though, it’s easier said than done. One of the biggest obstacles to making such projects work was the fact that government agencies cannot easily collect money. In the government structure that we have, revenue and expenditure are two different entities, and they rarely, if ever, talk to one another. All revenue, whether it be gross or net, is to be paid directly into the Consolidated Fund, and all expenditure comes out of the annual budget allotted to the government agencies at the beginning of each budget year. If that budget, as approved by Finance, does not include an item to cover the expenditure of mounting productions that could bring revenue in — and more to the point, if the revenue generated by those productions is not permitted to be equivalent to the projected expenditure — then one cannot produce shows.
At the same time, the business of putting on productions for paying audiences, even in The Bahamas where people often decry our small population as making it impossible to make theatre pay, has a track record of modest success. Most shows, if well publicized and well managed, can at the very least cover their expenses out of their ticket sales alone, and in some cases turn small profits. Given the fact that our actual target audience is far larger than the permanent population of the country — our tourists need things to do onshore — surely live theatre can have some measure of success. What’s more, when ticket sales are paired with the model of attracting sponsorship from companies and individuals to assist in the mounting of such shows, theatre in The Bahamas should be able to sustain itself over time and even, in the long term, be able to do what politicians seem to imagine is the be-all and end-all of existence — create opportunities for employment. (See Ward Minnis for a fuller exposition of this idea.)
The aim of Shakespeare in Paradise, then, is to do just that. It’s an uncommon, lofty goal, but it’s one that we believe, if managed, could succeed. Why do we believe that?
Well, first of all, because Bahamian theatre is one of the strongest, most vibrant, and most well developed of the artistic sectors in the country. Never mind that theatre’s been in a slump for the past ten years. Slumps are just that — depressions in activity that occur for one reason for another. The current reason is the lack of adequate theatre and rehearsal space in the capital, and the consequent lack of varied and vibrant theatre for people to see. But the critical mass, in terms of actors, a handful of technicians, writers, and directors, exists, and audiences (as this year’s productions have demonstrated) are interested in and hungry for local live performances.
And second of all, because young Bahamians, more and more, are not only expressing interest in the arts, they’re taking risks and making career choices to put them in the arts. Their parents and forebears, many of whom have worked assiduously to ensure that the avenues for creative activity are closed to their children (why that is I don’t know, but effectively it’s so), are bemused by this turn of events. Those of us who chose, in part or in full, to commit to our own involvement are elated and inspired. But now is the time for the expertise that developed in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s to come together with the enthusiasm of the 2000s to create something that will retain its strength and grow into something big and fabulous.
Hence Shakespeare in Paradise.
The purpose of the festival is to do many things at once. It’s to help us focus our theatrical activity in a way that hasn’t occurred before. In the distant past, a single institution, the Dundas Centre for the Performing Arts, took most of the credit for developing Bahamian theatre. In one way that was good; it enabled us to concentrate scarce resources on developing a functional community theatre in a single place, and it enabled the people who gave of their time and energy to keep the place going a home and a place to develop a repertoire and a standard that enabled Bahamian theatre to be able to compete on a world scale. In another, though, it was not so good. The Dundas’ history is a mixed one, deeply embedded in our oppressive past, and it could never entirely shake its reputation as a bastion of racial and class superiority. The downside of the establishment of standards was that those people who were unable or unwilling to meet the standards of performance or production (or, alternatively, those who found it difficult to break into the tightly-knit community that kept the theatre afloat) interpreted their outsidership exclusively in terms of the Dundas’ history, with the result that the Dundas earned the reputation of being a place where the average person would not feel welcome. Even today, when the Dundas is a rental facility open to anyone who is able to pay the fees for a single night’s performances, audiences who would flock to other spaces are hesitant to enter the Dundas.
The creation of a festival has among its goals the idea of freeing Bahamian theatre from being tied to any specific location. Any space that works is liable to become a performance space, if we can afford to make it so (this year, we have had to temper our ambition with prudence, but as the festival grows, we hope to get ever more creative in our performances and our venues). It also includes the idea of freeing theatre from being tied to any specific group. As we plan for next year’s festival (and planning will start as soon as this one is over, seven weeks from now), we’ll be looking for performances and productions that meet our standards. We’ll be asking for people to submit their productions for consideration for inclusion, and we’ll take productions from anywhere, as long as they meet our standards, work with our venues, and fit our programme.
The creation of the festival also has the aim of training new generations in the art of production. Lots and lots of people want to go onstage, and have done so in the past; and there’s plenty of good talent out there. What there isn’t, however, is a widespread sense of what theatre owes to its audience. A well-produced show should have respect for its audience (just as the audience should have respect for live performances) — there should be no dark, noisy scene-changes, no distracting side activities, no long and late beginnings. There should be adequate lighting and competent direction so that all players can be seen and heard. There should be an understanding that live theatre is different from concerts, and that performers should be able to perform without microphones as far as possible, and that sound and light technicians should respect the performers and the performances and not be intrusive in their contributions. And so we wanted Shakespeare in Paradise to enable us to train technicians and stagehands in the art of good production.
And finally, the goal of Shakespeare in Paradise is to provide audiences with a solid week of good theatre; to provide a product we can sell to locals and tourists alike; to create a product that Bahamians can be proud about; and to create an avenue for new generations of Bahamian playwrights, directors, technicians and actors to hone their skills. We want a festival that’s international in flavour, too, because tourism isn’t simply a spectator sport — in many other countries, festivals attract tourists by attracting participants (and theatre festivals, even more so than film festivals, bring people in groups as well as on their own). It’s also to provide students and teachers with educational experiences, and it’s also to celebrate our being who and where we are — Bahamians, sitting at the gateway to a whole new world, uniting the Caribbean, the Americas, Africa, Asia and Europe in a single place and time.
Those were, and are, the goals. We invite you to check back as we outline how we’ve gone about putting them into practice — and then to help us evaluate how well we met them this year.
Because we’re not in this for the short haul. The festival that provided our inspiration, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, began with a single Shakespeare play in 1935, and has grown from strength to strength to this day. We’d like to see this grow in a similar way. So we might not hit all our targets at once — but if we know where we’re headed, we can find the best route to get there.
