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- 06/15/09 at 17:15 ET

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.

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.