Three short plays of compelling interest were performed on July 28 last at the National Cultural Centre. “Wake”, “Land Fight” and “The Beginning and End” were presented as the main part of a dramatic programme called Drama Explosion created and performed by teachers of drama at secondary schools. Alongside the plays were exhibitions of story telling by some of the teachers, who offered a varied selection of tales in veneration of that art in the Guyanese tradition.
Drama Explosion, coordinated by Sonia Yarde, was the closing performance for The Summer Workshop for Teachers of Drama 2023 run by the National School of Theatre Arts and Drama (NSTAD) as an affiliate programme for the Unit of Allied Arts (UAA) of the Ministry of Education. In this annual collaboration the UAA brings together secondary school teachers from all regions of the country for workshops in theatre. They are given short courses in performance and technical theatre drawn from the NSTAD course offerings and run by selected NSTAD lecturers and tutors and members of the National Drama Company. A different cohort of students are brought in each year and over the many years since this programme began students have come from all of the ten regions.
This year the UAA brought in teachers in a process coordinated by drama officer LaVonne George from six regions and Georgetown. The tutors were Yarde, Ayanna Waddell and Esther Hamer of the NDC, Seeta Shah Roath and Nizam Bacchus of NSTAD and Shaundel Phillips of the Guyanese CXC Panel. The normal spread of courses in the workshops represented Elements of Stagecraft, Acting and Stage Management, but because it is training for drama teachers, this year included Costuming, Lighting, Sound, Storytelling, Cultural Forms, Critiques and Research for SBAs and Pedagogy: Teaching of Drama.
Special emphasis was placed on the CXC subjects of Theatre Arts and Performing Arts because there has been a steadily increasing list of schools offering these subjects for examinations. As a consequence of this, the number of untrained teachers carrying the subjects has also increased. Some teachers are trained – they are holders of professional teaching qualifications – but it was discovered that too many of them had not been trained in theatre. The annual summer workshops therefore turned attention to this and added certain areas to ensure that teachers were more equipped to handle Theatre Arts and Performing Arts in schools.
Those relevant areas were Storytelling, Cultural Forms – Stick Fighting, Wake and Kumina, Pedagogy, and strategies to make them more competent in supervising and marking such SBAs where students have to research and interview theatre personalities. Storytelling is approached as performance – the art of narration, but it is also a tradition which is a cultural form that students need to know about as well as how to perform it. One of the things that make Theatre Arts more difficult than the average CSEC subject is the component of research. Students have to research cultural forms as well as theatre personalities. Another thing is the critique. Students have to be able to see a performance and write critically about it, including assessments. In this workshop teachers learn to be more comfortable handling these components. Furthermore, pedagogy has to be applied to the special subject area and there was a short course that dealt with that.
Yet another demanding area of CSEC drama is application of the cultural form. This was among the more prominent factors in last July’s performance. The three plays performed were all drawn from a cultural form and the play needed to reflect knowledge of the form. This came over in plot and performance. The plays were short, but this particular factor was one of the things that made them intriguing, interesting to look at, and thought provoking. Playmaking is one of the areas students are tested in at CSEC and the teachers showed themselves quite competent in this, including the application of the chosen tradition.
Their quite accomplished and entertaining performances served as their final exam. They showed off much of what they had learned in the weeks of work and were graded. At the same time, some not insignificant talent was demonstrated.
One of the plays developed in the playmaking exercise was “The Wake” in which a girl grieves for the death of her very close friend who committed suicide. Everyone is surprised and perplexed at her violent rejection of her own husband until it is revealed at the wake that she was responsible for the friend’s tragic end. The situation was well dramatised and acted, illustrating characteristics belonging to beliefs associated with the traditional wake wherein old scores and conflicts surrounding the deceased are settled and guilty parties are revealed.
The teachers responsible for “The Wake” were Fellica Gladstone, Eloy Thomas, Indra Chacon, Tianna Liverpool, and Lakeitha Ferguson, who well illustrated the application of the cultural form in an exercise in playmaking.
Similar skills were excellently demonstrated in “Land Fight” by Okel Fordyce, Tristana Roberts, Ariana Warde and Danielle Williams. This was a drama based on the stick fighting tradition in which a greedy man gets his just deserts, defeated in a stick fight in spite of his protection by supernatural forces. This group very imaginatively and dramatically weaved a plot in which the stronger obeah of right prevails over corruption and ill-will in a surprise ending.
The traditional culture in which the old practice of stick fighting in village life was located was skillfully dramatised, including the rivalry and the spiritual connections. It was very neat overall and effectively staged and performed by the group working together.
The third play “The Beginning and End” was devised from a Jamaican cultural tradition known as Kumina. This is a religious survival of African derivation rooted in ancestor worship famous for its very distinctive dance ritual and identifiable spiritual drum rhythms. It is steeped in a strong setting of a monarchy in the province in which it is practised in rural Jamaica (Portland).
This group, comprising Frederick Minty, Christine Alphonso, Mariela Bennett, Christine Singh and Jude Holder, devised a plot in which rituals of royal succession become interwoven and compromised by personal intrigue. It was a commendable attempt to recreate and dramatise the Kumina community.
The other strong feature of Drama Explosion was the exhibition of storytelling. A clearly significant array of tales were selected and performed. Some were original compositions based on village life and other human circumstances. Others were humorous and the audience could relate to them. But there were those that evoked special interest because they seemed drawn from an ancient Guyanese folk tradition of beliefs and folk tales. A prize for the best story was awarded to Eion Adams.
Such tales as “Lightning and Thunder” told by Ariana Warde and “The Tale of the Silver Comb” narrated by Indra Chacon reflected ancient Amerindian mythology and might have been taken from the store of myths that belong to the largest corpus of oral literature in Guyana. In fact, “Lightning and Thunder” may be described as a myth of origin because of its assumed original function to explain cosmology, the universe and natural phenomena.
The silver comb has left a corpus of tales of the supernatural in Guyanese folklore, particularly those pertaining to the Fairmaid. These tales have come out of the Amerindian setting into a wider range of folk beliefs.
