Playwright Urges Deeper Understanding of Cultural Heritage

As Caribbean leaders consider tapping into traditional and nontraditional resources to strengthen economies and emerge from the current crisis, they are being advised that decisions should not be made without a true understanding and recognition of the historical significance of arts and cultural heritage to the region.

Respected regional playwright and director Rawle Gibbons, who has been involved in the decades-long struggle for the legitimisation of the arts, drew attention to the matter as he noted the penchant of some administrators to view the creative industry solely through the lens of dollars and cents.

“We’ve sort of headed pell-mell along the path of creative sector development as a way of boosting that sector and our overall economy and that can be problematic,” said the Trinidad-born Gibbons as he delivered the annual Earl Warner Memorial Lecture on the topic

“Caribbean Performance: Theatres

of Being”.

The virtual event, held on 4 November 2021, was organised by the Department of Creative and Performing Arts in collaboration with The Earl Warner Trust (Barbados).

Gibbons said there were some critical questions that the authorities needed to consider.

“What would happen if we paused for a moment ... and imagined instead how our economies can be developed according to the logic and principles organic to Caribbean creativity? What would be the economic arrangements for such a plan? What kind of social institutions would be required or what role would our existing institutions play in an economy that is built on the ancestral instruction of Caribbean creative necessity? Can we decode the creative imagination of our ancestors and secure, for intergenerational development, a vessel that can withstand hazards, whether from land or sea? How

do we weave their legacy as we wind our way into the future, and can we as a region undertake this alone?”

He reflected on the history of artist activism in the region which was instrumental in shaping identity and retaining traditions and that led to the emergence of a type of theatre that was community-based, had its own aesthetics in opposition to that of the West, and took a more diversified and interdisciplinary approach. Gibbons recalled the contributions of pioneers like Guyanese historian and scholar Walter Rodney who shared his knowledge and experience with people from all strata in Jamaica in the late 1960s, including the underclass, a process he described as groundings.

“All of this influenced the kind of theatre that we made, the communal grounding, the integration of the artforms, the admission of what is called yard theatre in Jamaica.

“I feel that when this period is assessed as being just a question of young people with too much energy or being fashionable by following America and so on, it doesn’t do justice in any way. It’s another form of denial of the past, of widening the gap of absence. So we have to affirm what was done in that period as revolutionary, nothing less than that in terms of the impact upon the lives that we lived.”

Gibbons said the groundwork for that type of activism was laid by Errol Hill, Beryl McBurnie, Derek Walcott and the ideology of Frantz Fanon, C.L.R James and others. He said Earl Warner continued the search for Caribbean aesthetics in the arts and went on to establish himself as the first professional director in the region.

The profound impact that Warner had on Caribbean theatre was recognised by the Principal of the Cave Hill Campus, Professor Clive Landis, and Head of Department of Creative and Performing Arts in the Faculty of

Culture, Creative and Performing

Arts, Andrew Millington.

Landis said The University of the West Indies remains indebted to Warner and is building on his legacy by laying the foundation for the establishment of the performing arts as a flourishing industry that offers significant economic and financial benefit to practitioners and Caribbean nations. He stated the Faculty of Culture, Creative and Performing Arts has a pivotal role in this regard.

Despite the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic and the lack of opportunity and appreciation for artists, Principal Landis said there were reasons to be hopeful, referencing the 2021 valedictorian address by Iyka Dorival when she declared her intention to advocate for creatives.

Millington described Warner as a gifted and talented theatre director who spent much of his life contributing to nurturing and the provocation of the Caribbean intellectual imagination. He said Warner seldom played to the box office but made attendees confront issues of truth, integrity, and their imagination. l