Arts on Sunday

The third edition of the Guyana National Drama Festival ended its run of performances last Friday with plays entered by students of the National School of Theatre Arts and Drama. 

The Third National Drama Festival of Guyana, which is now in session, seems to be confirming the growing trend among Guyanese playwrights to use drama to tackle burning social issues.

The Commonwealth Foundation in London has announced the 2014 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, which is a competition open to all writers across the Commonwealth.

The recent performance of the Dance Season 2013 of the National Dance Company titled Suites –Revista choreographed and directed by Vivienne Daniel, in some ways underlines a number of significant factors in the place and state of the company at the present time.

Mark this for a mercy; that here birds, even here,   sustain the wide and impossible highways of warm current, divide the sky; mark this- they all day have amazed the air, that it falls apart from  their heavy wings in thin wedges of sound; though the dull black earth is very still, sweating a special sourness they make high over the  hard thorn-trees their own magnificent turning, they chain all together with very slow journeys to and fro the limits of the dead place; smelling anything old and no longer quick.

The Embassy of Mexico in Guyana continued its series of Mexican cultural events with a photographic exhibition outstanding for its show of images, colour and words as it was notorious for its under-representation and unexploited opportunity. 

Cassia Alphonso’s Black Cake Mix, won the award for Best Book of Poetry in the 2012 Guyana Prize for Literature, jointly with Ian McDonald’s The Comfort of All Things. 

By Al Creighton This is an edited version of three features which appeared in Sunday Stabroek on October 24, October 31 and November 7, 2010.

One of the very interesting traditional festivals that still exist in the Caribbean has its grand performance at the end of August each year. 

The Guyana Prize for Literature Awards 2012 will be announced and presented tonight at the Awards Presentation to be held at the Pegasus Hotel starting at 7.00pm. 

A part of the Amerindian heritage that is very well known, highly visible and accessible is the literature. 

When the Guyanese nation celebrates Amerindian heritage it is like celebrating Guyana itself. 

Carifesta XI, 2013, closes its curtains today in Paramaribo, Suriname.  At its closing this evening it is expected that Haiti will be declared the host and the venue for Carifesta XII in 2015. 

Carifesta – the Caribbean Festival of the Arts is experiencing another revival. 

By Lori Shelbourn There is unending curiosity about the way Wilson Harris writes.

On each anniversary of Emancipation the African presence in the Caribbean is celebrated; whatever can be exhibited of the cultural traditions is highlighted and the performing arts pay tribute to the African vestiges that they can claim. 

Ronald Hollingsworth over the years has risen to be among the most prominent and established Guyanese dramatists – as both playwright and director. 

Not wanting to deny, I believed it.  Not wanting to believe it I denied our Bastille Day. 

The performance of a play in Georgetown, Pleasing Mrs Jones, by a Linden drama group led by Mike James revealed a number of very interesting developments in the popular theatre that suggest the way Guyana is reflecting current regional trends. 

This subject was earlier approached in a publication The Walter Rodney Factor in West Indian Literature by Al Creighton and partly carried in ‘Arts on Sunday.’