Last year we took a huge gamble. We pulled together Shakespeare in Paradise on a dream and a prayer, with no money to get things going, but armed with an idea and some faith that it could work. And it did — thanks to the support of the public, who bought tickets and came out in good numbers, and because of the generosity of many partners who gave grants and exchanges in kind that helped cut our cash expenditures in more than half. Thanks to you all, Shakespeare in Paradise 2009 was able to break even.

But breaking even is only part of the picture. We’ve got a plan for this festival, and we envision a future that has Shakespeare in Paradise as a regular part of the social and artistic calendar. So it’s not enough just to cover our costs — we have to cover our costs and bank a little to make sure we can mount a festival in a year’s time.

Just so you know — the festival costs roughly $200,000 to produce, all told. To put that in perspective: our ticket prices last year topped at $25, and we offered several discounts to make it possible for people to attend multiple performances and to help students afford to come see our plays. But for us to cover all our costs from ticket sales alone we would have had to sell our tickets at $50 a head!

Now that leaves us in a difficult position. We could raise our ticket prices. We could eliminate all discounts. But neither of these is an option that appeals to us. We happen to believe that theatre isn’t a luxury in a democratic society. We buy into the Shakespearean idea that theatre holds a mirror up to nature, and that societies without theatre don’t often get to look properly at themselves or the world they inhabit. So we won’t be raising our ticket prices anytime soon, and we’ll let the discounts stand.

So what are our other options? Here’s where you come in. You can help us bring off this festival in one of any number of ways:

1. Become a Sponsor! Last year, Shakespeare in Paradise reached audiences of 3,500 people. This year, we’ve added an extra weekend and a production or two, and we hope to increase our reach to 5,000. Your support will benefit us both!

2. Make a donation! If you do not have a business and would like to contribute to the growth of theatre in The Bahamas you are welcome to just make a donation to the festival!

3. Become a Partner! If you are low on funds but you have services or goods to offer, consider a barter or in-kind exchange. If it were not for our barter exchanges last year we would have never been able to pull off the festival—your help this year will be invaluable!

4. Book early! We’ll be releasing our schedule in the next two weeks, and we’ll be opening our phonelines for advance bookings. Get your tickets then! I know it sounds counterintuitive, but the more actual ticket sales we get, the more streamlined we can make our advertising budget. And it’ll help you as well as us — advance bookings are the best places to get discounts on multiple shows. What we seem to lose on advance sales can be saved in advertising dollars, so help us out and buy your tickets as soon as you can!

5. Buy our merchandise! Last year we printed up t-shirts for each of our productions, and we sold the t-shirts at the productions. This year we hope to have a range of t-shirts — not just the expensive limited-edition poster tees that we sold last year, but also a more affordable generic Shakespeare in Paradise 2010 tee as well. Come and help us sell out of both!

6. Help us move last year’s merchandise! We’ve got shirts left over from all of our productions except for The Tempest. You’ve still got a chance to wear a small piece of art by Jace McKinney (One White One Black), Reuno Pratt (Caribbean Voices), Lindsay Braynen (Zora), Jon Murray (Love in Two Acts), or Trevaughn Neely (Music of The Bahamas). We’ve also got CDs and VHS copies of Music of The Bahamas for sale as well (special order DVDs – burned specifically for you can also be purchased). Move fast, though — we’ve got limited supplies!

7. Sponsor a schoolchild or two! For $15 per person, you can help us subsidize our school discounts of $10 a student. Help us make theatre an integral part of the Bahamian schoolchild’s experience!

8. Advertise in our programme! We’re printing a minimum of 5000 of these for distribution throughout the festival. Like last year, our programmes are attractive and collectible, so contact us for pricing!

9. Support our sponsors! We’ll add their logos to our website as they come on board, so please give them your business!

10. Spread the word! The more you talk about Shakespeare in Paradise, the more word of mouth we get, the less we’ll need to invest in advertising and marketing coverage. Let’s make this festival a viral thing!

Contact us for more information: admin@shakespeareinparadise.org

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.

***

And meantime, Craig Pinder’s rehearsals for The Tempest are moving on, and rehearsals have shifted from one cast member’s house to another, bigger one.
Patti-Anne Ali arrives on Saturday, and after that the real work begins. Right now — the play’s getting read again, and everybody’s reading it.

More here!

Bahamian theatre technician Michael Reiach, graduate of the Sheridan College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning’s theatre programme and veteran lighting and sound operator, will share his expertise with interested students in preparation for the Shakespeare in Paradise theatre festival.

The workshop will cover the following:

• Stage Managing
  • A theatre production is a complex activity, requiring full coordination and discipline. The main reason many productions fail (are boring, start late, move slowly, etc) is that they do not have active or competent stage managers. The stage manager runs the show from behind the scenes.
  • In this workshop, you’ll learn the basics of stage managing – what goes into a show, what details need to be covered, what makes a show great.
• Stage Lighting
  • In theatre, lighting supplements the action on the stage by setting moods, augmenting scenery, providing special effects, and so on. Lighting can make or break a show — but often it’s more subtle than the lighting that is done for concerts and other live performance.
  • In this workshop, you’ll learn the basics of theatrical lighting
• Audio for the Stage
  • Audio for theatre (which is largely acoustic, indoor, live performance) is different from audio for music concerts or studio work, where amplifiers carry the heaviest load. Actors are responsible for making themselves heard; audio technicians are responsible for assisting them.
  • In this workshop you’ll learn the basics of theatre audio, including a couple of tricks that you may not have known before
• General theatre orientation
  • The theatre is a whole business. What goes onstage is like the tip of an iceberg — beneath it is a network of support that makes the show succeed.
  • In this workshop you’ll learn all the various elements of theatre, from front of house and box office to management to backstage and technical support.

The workshop has been made possible by a generous grant from the Department of Culture of the Ministry of Youth, Sports and Culture. It will take place at the National Dance School, Rosetta Street Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays from August 17 to August 27, 2009.

The first auditions for The Tempest by William Shakespeare, adapted and dramaturged for a Bahamian setting by Nicolette Bethel, Travis Cartwright-Carroll, Reva Sharma, and Toni Francis, will be held tomorrow, Saturday, August 1st.

The Tempest is the signature piece of this year’s Shakespeare in Paradise theatre festival (October 5th – 12th, 2009).

Auditions will be held on Saturday, August 1st beginning at 11:00 am at The Hub, Bay Street and Colebrook Lane.

The parts that are available can be found here.

Information about the directors of this production can be found here.

You are asked to come with a prepared piece of no more than two minutes in length. You will also be asked to read either a monologue or a part of a scene from the play.

You can download those pieces here.

Future auditions will take place for Music of The Bahamas and we will post that information as soon as it becomes available.

If you have any questions you can email us at admin@shakespeareinparadise.org ]]> http://nicobethel.net/ringplay/2009/07/31/the-tempest-goes-into-production/feed/ 0 http://nicobethel.net/ringplay/2009/06/04/shakespeare-in-paradise-the-dream/ http://nicobethel.net/ringplay/2009/06/04/shakespeare-in-paradise-the-dream/#comments Thu, 04 Jun 2009 20:21:57 +0000 Ringplay http://nicobethel.net/ringplay/?p=421 So what possesses a group of people to up and decide to create a theatre festival with no money to speak of, nothing but a dream?

For us, it all began just over ten years ago. Back then, Ringplay was just about a twinkle in the founders’ eyes. The Dundas Repertory was still going — it was in its last year — and Ringplay had just been imagined, though not really formed, during the summer of 1998. Philip and I (Nico) were living on the West Coast of Canada, teaching at Pearson College where Philip had established a Theatre Arts programme. Now if you know anything about Pearson College and the United World College system, academics are only part of the equation; students at Pearson are expected to do other things as well. Instead of a fall break, students get a Project Week — a time when they go off and engage in a week of activities that have some constructive result. And the President of the college had suggested to Philip — had strongly suggested — that for Project Week the Theatre Arts students go to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon — a seventeen-hour drive by van from Victoria.

Well, when your boss makes a suggestion like that, specially when that boss is responsible for getting you your job, you don’t say no, so off we went. We’d never heard of OSF, and we really didn’t have huge expectations — and the festival blew us out of the water. We saw the best week of theatre we’d ever seen, no exceptions (Broadway and the West End included), and for extremely reasonable prices Stateside — tickets were $35 and thereabouts. Ashland is a tiny town, perhaps the same size as downtown Nassau, not as large as the span of Nassau from Mackey Street to Nassau Street (Victoria to West is more like it), with three theatres, and the Festival runs the economy of the town from February to November every year. And the quality!

Philip and I were blown away, and as for the students — who, remember, were attending an international school and for many of whom English was not a first language — they were converted. Philip and I returned in fall 1999, and when we left Pearson in the summer of 2000, Ashland was a major stop on the way. That summer, we were met in Oregon by Philip’s brother David (a.k.a. the President of Ringplay), and he had his turn to be blown away. (You can see the blow by blow of our time in Ashland in 2000 here, at our proto-blog, our account of crossing the USA in pre-blog software days.)

And before we left, we’d asked the question. If Ashland can do it, how come Nassau can’t?

So there you have it, the beginning of the dream. And now, we’re going to find out. If Ashland can do it …

And here’s the result of all of that silence:

Ringplay Productions is excited to announce the First Annual International Shakespeare in Paradise Theatre Festival, to be held in Nassau, Bahamas, 5th-12th October, 2009.

Shakespeare in Paradise celebrates the best in World, Caribbean, African, and African American theatre, all presented in historic and exciting spaces in New Providence.

This year’s inaugural festival will feature Shakespeare’s The Tempest; Zora, a one-woman play by Laurence Holder about the life of African-American anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston, whose work in Georgia, Florida, The Bahamas and the Caribbean remains inspirational today; and One White One Black, a two-hander by Caymanian Frank McField, a play that wowed audiences in CARIFESTA X Guyana.

For more information go here:  http://shakespeareinparadise.org

And watch this space.