Arts on Sunday

There is a substantial body of work by a writer who was one of St Lucia’s most outstanding dramatists and who was quite dominant among West Indian playwrights throughout the 1960s into the 1970s. 

August Town Up from the valley one night came a bass-sound darkness and a treble of light.

Theatre has been a staple product in Carifesta throughout its history.

To Toussaint L’Ouverture TOUSSAINT, the most unhappy man of men!       Whether the whistling Rustic tend his plough      Within thy hearing, or thy head be now               Pillowed in some deep dungeon’s earless den;—               O miserable Chieftain!

For The D May I learn the shape of that hurt which captured you nightly into dead city, discovering through streets steep with the sufferer’s beat;

British-American poet W H Auden was talking about the masters of art, the great painters and their study of suffering and the human condition.

The play Watch De Ride 3 recently performed at the National Cultural Centre made a number of apposite statements.

Escape was a full dance production staged at the National Cultural Centre on June 10 last. 

Assassins of conversation they bury the voice they assassinate, in the beloved grave of the voice, never to be silent.

By Alim Hosein As the deadline for receipt of entries to the 2017 Guyana Visual Arts Competition (GVAC) approached on May 27, there was a large number of artists who had earlier arrived at Castellani House, the National Gallery of Art, to submit their entries.

Last week’s performance of “Nothing to Laugh About 10” at the National Cultural Centre (NCC) seems to have sealed the issue about current audience choices in popular theatre in Guyana.

Guyanese in Georgetown had a resounding, populous J’ouvert for this year’s independence anniversary, which saw overwhelming multitudes descend upon the National Park, some of them moving there after leaving the flag raising ceremony at D’Urban Park.

Mark McWatt’s multiple prize-winning work of fiction Suspended Sentences: Fictions of Atonement  provides an extremely unique way of handling the issue of Guyanese Independence, which is perhaps the most remarkable direct treatment of such a theme in Guyanese literature since Independence. 

Ode To Autumn Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease, For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Arrival Day, May 5, is taken very seriously in Guyana, politically, culturally and in the general life of the people.

In very general terms there has been a great leap forward in terms of theatre and secondary schools in Guyana recently.

Major dramatic productions by schools in Guyana are sporadic, apart from one school that has staged an annual public play for at least the past three years.

‘Tis the season of Shakespeare once again. Today is his birthday – April 23.

[Barry Braithwaite, The Mighty Itanami, Vol. 1, Georgetown, Sphere Entertainment Graphics, Spectrum Creative Productions Ltd, 2017. 

Popular theatre returned to the stage of the National Cultural Centre recently with Darren McAlmont’s Woman-In-Law.