Helen Taitt: Guyana’s most accomplished professional dancer
(Helen Taitt My Life, My Country. Georgetown : New Guyana Company, 2008. 2nd edition. Introduction by Janet Jagan)
Guyanese actor, dramatist, poet and academic Michael Gilkes wrote the play The Last of the Redmen for actor Clairmonte Taitt, his friend and colleague in the theatre. They both built their early career during the first decade of the Theatre Guild in Georgetown and worked together again several years later in Barbados. The original intention was that Taitt would perform the play, which was quite fitting since it is actually his fictionalised biography, (but Gilkes ended up performing it himself). Very thinly disguised, it is, among many other things, a documentary of the legendary Woodbine House in Cummingsburg, Georgetown, owned by the talented Taitt family and about the generations of artistic activity at which they were the centre as hosts, facilitators, producers and performers.
This complex drama often makes nostalgic journeys to the culture and society of Georgetown’s coloured middle class in a colonial era with a strong emphasis on art and achievement. Such visits are reminiscent of similar flashbacks to the past in another of Gilkes’s works, the collection of poems Joanstown, which has its own share of autobiography. It paints portraits of the Kingston district in a garden city whose character has changed and whose dissipated values remain immortalised only in art and literature.
My Life, My Country by Helen Taitt is another document that shares those qualities with Gilkes’s works. It is very closely related and treats the same subjects as the play because it is the autobiography of Clairmonte Taitt’s sister, Helen, who made the theatre her life-long career, performing, composing and teaching right up to the end of her life. She was Guyana’s best known, most accomplished and acclaimed professional dancer, and was also a choreographer, writer, dance instructor, and a specialist in ballet. She sketches the history of Woodbine House, its cultural activities, theatrical productions and the distinguished roll call of some of Guyana’s foremost artists who were its guests, or who performed or exhibited there.
Taitt scrupulously avoids dates in her account; it is remarkable for the absence of any citation of precise log or diary entries of when any event took place. But despite that minor observation, the text provides another priceless document of British Guiana before the war. She is a first-hand witness of the existence and conditions on the Corentyne sugar estates and their adjacent villages. She covers the same social history treated by Gilkes, giving a personality to old Georgetown and bringing to it the testimony of one who was personally involved as a member of the celebrated Taitt family. To increase its value, this book is the only true record in existence of the life and work of one of the nation’s most remarkable artists.
It covers decades of her experiences travelling and working in the USA, Europe and the Caribbean, ending when she eventually returns with the intention of resettling in Guyana just after October 1992. She first left home for training in social work at university in Jamaica, then again to study dance at Balanchine’s School of American Ballet in New York, and later to pursue her career further afield. Among the schools, studios and companies she set up were the Berlin Art Circle, the Barbados Art Circle and the Taitt Dance Theatre.
Janet Jagan, to whom Taitt entrusted her autobiography (originally submitted as a weekly serial in the Mirror (January 10 to May 16, 1993), adds an introduction which helps to place the book (published 2006 and reprinted 2008) and the life of its author in useful perspective.
Helen Taitt was a writer as well as dancer, choreographer, instructor, manager, and directed many of her stage productions. My Life, My Country is remarkable for the quality of its narrative. Taitt, who also wrote poems, exhibits a consciousness of craft and turns out a book whose narration is worthy of fiction after the fashion of Denise Harris or even Pauline Melville in her employment and control of occasional humour.
There are several very interesting and revealing accounts. Perhaps Taitt’s best known dramatic work is the musical Stabroek Fantasy which has long been attributed in perhaps all the records to another author. Taitt recalls its creation at her home Woodbine House. “One morning I awoke with the details of an entire show in mind… nothing like that had ever happened to me before! The story centred around a group of Georgetown, Stabroek Market hucksters, and I called it Stabroek Fantasy. Scene by scene came as if I had seen it all before. It was very successful” with music by Hugh Sam, and attracted the interest of radio and an American film company. She performed it with “a group of twelve young people and called us Theatre 13… Unfortunately the belief that thirteen was an unlucky number was upheld in this case. At our first meeting after the performances, we were informed by number 13 that she had sent my script to Washington DC and copyrighted Stabroek Fantasy in her name!”
In another chapter she describes the finding/founding of Woodbine House which was to become so important in Guyana cultural history, discovered on Murray Street when her father, Government Medical Officer Dr Taitt, was transferred to Georgetown and her mother went house hunting. There are accounts of productions involving the work of several of the country’s most famous artists in whose early development the house played a part. They involved Arthur Seymour, Stanley Greaves, Ron Savory, Hugh Sam, Wilbert Holder, Cicely Robinson, the Police Male Voice Choir and the Woodside Choir.
Of much significance was the discovery of Philip Moore. “When I was a Welfare Officer on the Corentyne Coast, I came across a cottage covered in carvings and paintings. It was the home of our own Philip Moore, and I decided that Guiana must see his creations. Happy indeed I was when at last I brought them to Georgetown and built a shed to house them at the Guiana Art Centre, where they excited much interest during a month-long ‘Jamboree of Arts’ at which he taught wood carving.”
Helen Taitt’s life story is that of one who persevered, realizing her determination to be a professional dancer and pursuing a long career in Germany (mainly), the USA, France, Holland, Switzerland, Dominica, St Lucia, Barbados and Guyana. She also tells how her residency in Germany began. “The German Ambassador in Georgetown offered me a three-week visit to Germany as a guest of his government… It was quite enjoyable being a real VIP for the first time in my life and I made the most of it.”
The details of her career as a ballet dancer make impressive reading with its story of professionalism, undisputed talent, recognition and achievement. But it also bears a sub-text of the potentially world-conquering fame that could have been hers were it not for the consistent and repeated acts of racism that definitely interfered with her career and advancement. She tells many tales of open admission of her superior talent and proficiency, accompanied by confessions by white agents that there was no place for a non-white ballet dancer on the American stage.
