Track Road Theatre (which goes by the initials TRT these days) is back on its game with this evening of two one-act plays by European writers from the first quarter of the twentieth century. It’s one of the few times TRT has ventured outside The Bahamas for its material, and certainly the first I can remember when it’s produced something from outside the Diaspora. The two plays are short and small, and both were adapted for a Bahamian audience by Matthew Kelly, who also directed the evening.

The first, The Open Door, is an intimate story of impossible love originally written by UK playwright Alfred Sutro and published in 1922. Kelly has kept the dramatic core, but has adapted the characters and some details to fit the local audience, and it works. It’s performed by Kelly and Selina Archer. Archer is competent as Glennis Heastie, but it is Kelly who shines in his role. I’ve seen him on stage in numerous parts, but in this character and in this style of acting he has found his home, and he is clearly at his best when he’s occupying intimate, subtle parts.

The second, The Bear, is another love story of sorts, this one by Anton Chekhov, the great Russian playwright and short story writer. It’s typical Chekhov, with Russian passion all over the place, and tension up the wazoo, and it stood in sharp and successful contrast to the smaller, tighter, subtler Sutro work. In this one, the definite star is Dion Johnson, whom audiences might recognize from Da Spot and who recently performed in Guyana at CARIFESTA X 2008. He takes over as the rough, uncultured title character. His work is complemented by Leslie Ellis-Tynes, who does a fair job of holding up her end of the bargain in what is her first major role.

The performance takes place in the Hub, and is performed in the seven-eighths round, and the intimacy of the space and the closeness of the action lend an energy to the performance that isn’t common in Bahamian works. The usual style of over-the-top acting which has its place on a big, remote stage, is unnecessary in this setting, and it’s this which allows Kelly in his quieter moments to shine.

If there is any flaw in this production, it’s in the fact that almost all of the performances take place on a single note. The intimacy of the space calls for the expression of subtle, inner tension, something which not all of the performers have mastered, and it also allows for a range of moods and moments that was not capitalized on. What would also have added to the experience would have been a more intimate connection with the audience. One of the great advantages of theatre in the round is that the so-called “fourth wall” of the stage is swept away. There is no barrier of distance, stage, or light between the audience and the action, and that closeness could have been played with far more fully. The other, slightly less obvious, challenge is that the transitions between the different registers in the language — between the Bahamianized elements and the original early twentieth-century passages — are sometimes rough.

But that aside, this evening is a bargain at $15 a head. Live performance doesn’t come this cheap or this good very often — and if you get your tickets in advance, your $12 will go a long, long way.

Love in Two Acts plays until Sunday March 1 at the Hub, Bay Street and Colebrook Lane. Don’t miss it!

At the College/University of The Bahamas, art students and literature students and dancers and musicians and their supporters staged a demonstration of solidarity for Bahamian artists everywhere.

Below are photos from that event.

I got the idea for our Day of Absence from Douglas Turner Ward’s play.

Lo and behold, on YouTube I found a clip of a staged reading of that play. The above is from close to the end.

Note how the actors are playing the white characters in whiteface — a reversal of the traditional blackface that was used by white actors in vaudeville and other early twentieth-century genres.

In 1965, an African-American playwright by the name of Douglas Turner Ward wrote a play he called Day of Absence, which told the story of a small town — any small town — in the Deep South in which the white inhabitants discover on a particular day that all the black people have disappeared.

When this fact becomes general knowledge, the establishment comes to the brink of chaos. Without its black labor force, the town is paralyzed because of its dependence on this sector of the community.

Day of Absence: Information from Answers.com

Part of the reason I agreed to take the job of Director of Cultural Affairs, and much of the reason I left, was that, in many ways like African-Americans in the 1960s USA (and black Bahamians, and people of African heritage the world over), cultural workers in The Bahamas — artists, musicians, writers, actors, directors, dancers, designers, craftworkers, you name it — are marginalized, disrespected, and taken for granted in our nation.

Thirty-six years after independence and forty-one years after majority rule, creative workers in our country are unable to find work in the areas in which God has gifted them. There are virtually no avenues in The Bahamas to enable creative people to develop and hone their talents, or to enable them to make use of them when they are developed. Our greatest brain drain is arguably in the area of the arts; like Sidney Poitier over sixty years ago, Bahamians who want to exercise their talents in the cultural industries are faced with the choice of pursuing their callings as hobbies at home, or of leaving home to make a living by their gifts elsewhere. And we are all the poorer for it. 

That we appear to be unaware of the absurdity of this state of affairs in a nation which welcomes several millions of tourists to our shores annually is indicative, to my mind, of our abject conviction as a people that Bahamians, and particularly Bahamians of colour, are congenitally unable to produce, behave, or perform at any level that could possibly be considered world-class, and that it is a waste of time, money and effort to believe anything else.

Newsflash. No country can be great, or even good, without its artists. When all has passed away, when all has crumbled and gone, it’s not the speeches of the politicians, the enforcement of the country’s laws, the profit and the loss, or the tourist arrivals that are left behind to tell the story of the people who once walked this earth. It’s the art. It’s the statues, the paintings, the music, the poetry. Until we invest and believe in our art, and until we respect our artists, our country will never even be.

And so I’m calling for a Day of Absence in honour of all cultural workers in The Bahamas and around the world.

On February 11, 2009, I’m asking us all to stop — for a day, for a moment even, and imagine our country, our world, if we woke up one day and all the artists and cultural workers had disappeared.

I see it as a symbolic day, to be started this year and go on annually, where artists can come together in person or in cyberspace, and blog, email, sing, act, perform, speak, or whatever they want to do, in honour of art and artists themselves.

I chose February 11 because it’s my father’s birthday, and the disrespect began to be evident when he was Director of Culture. It wasn’t so clear while he was living. As with so much in this country, the people who did not respect what he stood for, who did not respect his art, respected him. Many of the leaders — the politicians of his day, and certainly the senior civil servants — had been his schoolmates, had known him and his family for years, and trusted him when he said he could do things. It’s for this reason and none other (well, maybe it was also because of our new-nation status too) that culture flourished to the extent that it did during the 1970s and early 1980s in The Bahamas. But his death in August 1987 took everyone by surprise.

People say that no one is dispensable, and there is certainly truth in that; but some people, especially when they fill a gap that is created because of ignorance or prejudice or disrespect, are irreplaceable. My father appeared to be one of those people — not because of any specialness about him (though he was special) but because of the fundamental emptiness and fear of self of the Bahamian people and their leaders.  Our cultural development didn’t take place during his tenure because our country respected culture. It took place because our leaders respected him. It took the government 7 years to replace him because they had taken him and his position and the work he was doing so much for granted, and had no idea what they had lost or how to replace it.

I know governments are only a part of the equation, but the things he left in place when he died in 1987 have yet to be replicated or replaced by the government or the country of The Bahamas, and culture has absolutely no respect in the national discourse.

And so: Day of Absence. It’s to be a day like Green Day or World Hunger Day — a movement, an idea that can catch fire, a spark that can spread without specific action, but just as people see the idea and become ignited by it.

Art and culture are the most human, the most divine, the most basic, and the most true actions that any living human being can do. But in The Bahamas (and throughout the world too) arts and culture are far more likely to be laughed at, talked down about, ignored, dismissed, insulted, disrespected, and taken for granted than any other action.

There are more creative people and more creative activity in our nation than there are other people with special interests. Yet our government has no legislation that supports our activity. It has a whole national sporting complex in Nassau and has sports fields and sports equipment and sports activities throughout the Bahamas, and it has legislation to govern hotels and tourist activity and education and health and disability, but nothing either in law or on the ground, to support, encourage or develop artistic activity.

And yet artists and cultural workers in The Bahamas and throughout the world are the invisible backbone of nations. When people think about what is “Bahamian” they think about what we produce, not what the doctors, lawyers, athletes, or politicians produce. This is true in every part of society, from top to bottom, from secular to religious.

And yet no one wants to recognize us, respect us, hire us, support us, or acknowledge that we exist or are important.

The Day of Absence concept is designed to get us as artists and society as general to imagine a world without artists. It is a day on which artists can stop what they are doing so that people can notice how fundamental art and artistic production and cultural activity are to everyday life. It is a day on which we encourage DJs to stop playing music for an entire minute, hour, or day, when we ask talk show hosts and newscasters and writers and editors and songwriters and artists and straw workers and advertising agencies and whoever else works in the creative field, is unappreciated for their activity, is producing work that people think of as “soft” or unnecessary, to stop doing what they do so that the people who do not respect us understand for just one moment or just one day that we are important, that without us society stops.

It’s a day to wear white because it’s a day without colour. Artists govern colour.

It’s a day to be silent because it’s a day without music, writing, speeches. Artists produce music, writing, speeches.

It’s a day to stop spending cash because without artists, money has no meaning — the designs on our coins and our paper money were created by artists.

It’s a day to worship silently, without music, or pretty clothing or the Bible, because artists are the vehicles God chooses to express the glory of His creation and Himself.

It’s a day of reflection, of discussion, of absence in honour of the creative spirit that our society insists on beating down, on disrespecting, on crushing.

On February 11, 2009, I will observe it.  Come join me.

Important Links:

• Global Voices: Cultural Solidarity
• Geoffrey Philp’s Blog Spot: Day of Absence Solidarity
• Womanish Words: And Still They Serve
• The Gaulin Wife: In Honour of a Day of Absence 
• Blogworld: Day of Absence Solidarity
• Facebook: Video of COB Peaceful Demonstration

Harold Pinter, AP Photo/ Max Nash

Moment of silence.

Nobel-winning playwright Harold Pinter dies at 78

By PAISLEY DODDS – 1 hour ago

LONDON (AP) — Harold Pinter, praised as the most influential British playwright of his generation and a longtime voice of political protest, has died after a long battle with cancer. He was 78.

Pinter, whose distinctive contribution to the stage was recognized with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, died on Wednesday, according to his second wife, Lady Antonia Fraser.

“Pinter restored theater to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue, where people are at the mercy of each other and pretense crumbles,” the Nobel Academy said when it announced Pinter’s award. “With a minimum of plot, drama emerges from the power struggle and hide-and-seek of interlocution.”

The Nobel Prize gave Pinter a global platform which he seized enthusiastically to denounce U.S. President George W. Bush and then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

“The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law,” Pinter said in his Nobel lecture, which he recorded rather than traveling to Stockholm.

“How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand?” he asked, in a hoarse voice.

I was supposed to post the flyer but never did.  Things are winding down for at work and life intervened.

Didn’t stop us from attending, however!

Some photographs, courtesy of Peter Ramsay:

"Crossings" - National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica. Photo: Peter Ramsay

"Katrina" - National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica. Photo: Peter Ramsay

"Katrina" - National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica. Photo: Peter Ramsay

Check back for a full review.

What’s especially worth watching is the piece that is currently the second one on the page (which doesn’t appear to work the way blogs usually work, so prepare to scroll) – “An open letter to Prime Minister Harper From Wajdi Mouawad, Governor General Award-winning Canadian playwright; Knight of the Ordre National des Arts et des Lettres, France; Artistic Director of French Theatre, The National Arts Centre of Canada”.

Here’s one good bit:

Last week, your government reaffirmed its manner of governing unilaterally, this time on a domestic issue, in bringing about reductions in granting programs destined for the cultural sector. A mere matter of budgeting, you say, but one which sends shock waves throughout the cultural milieu –rightly or wrongly, as we shall see- for being seen as an expression of your contempt for that sector. The confusion with which your Ministers tried to justify those reductions and their refusal to make public the reports on the eliminated programs, only served to confirm the symbolic significance of that contempt. You have just declared war on the artists.

Now, as one functionary to another, this is the second thing that I wanted to tell you: no government, in showing contempt for artists, has ever been able to survive. Not one. One can, of course, ignore them, corrupt them, seduce them, buy them, censor them, kill them, send them to camps, spy on them, but hold them in contempt, no. That is akin to rupturing the strange pact, made millennia ago, between art and politics.

And here’s another:

Art and politics both hate and envy one another; since time immemorial, they detest each other and they are mutually attracted, and it’s through this dynamic that many a political idea has been born; it is in this dynamic that sometimes, great works of art see the light of day. Your cultural politics, it must be said, provoke only a profound consternation. Neither hate nor detestation, not envy nor attraction, nothing but numbness before the oppressive vacuum that drives your policies.

This vacuum which lies between you and the artists of Canada, from a symbolic point of view, signifies that your government, for however long it lasts, will not witness either the birth of a political idea or a masterwork, so firm is your apparent belief in the unworthiness of that for which you show contempt. Contempt is a subterranean sentiment, being a mix of unassimilated jealousy and fear towards that which we despise. Such governments have existed, but not lasted because even the most detestable of governments cannot endure if it hasn’t the courage to affirm what it actually is.

Go read the whole thing:

The Wrecking Ball | New Political Theatre.

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.