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.