Tony Hall
 Agent: The Lordstreet Theatre Company Limited
PO Box 155, Scarborough, Trinidad and Tobago Email: lordstreet@yahoo.com
Home page: http://www.jouvayisland.com
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JOUVAY - a community awakening
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http://www.playwrightsworkshoptt.lordstreet.net
"Play is the brain’s favorite way of learning." Diane Ackerman
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Get the complete radio play, FLAG WOMAN by Tony Hall feat. Lordstreet Theatre Company.
For download on: http://www.trinidadtunes.com/index.php?action=album&id=599&Flag%20Woman&genre&gid=15
CDs on: http://www.trinidadmusicstore.com/genre_listing.asp?genre=Spoken%20Word
The full text is also available on: http://www.twilightcafe.lordstreet.net
JEAN & DINAH . . ., RED HOUSE [Fire! Fire!] and other plays by Tony Hall are available on http://www.amazon.com and http://www.authorhouse.com
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2010 Scheduled Appearances by Tony Hall
A Jouvay Process Workshop - JPTP: January 25th to May 14th, hosted by Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut at Trinity in Trinidad Global Learning Site, Curepe,
Trinidad, West Indies. Tel: 1-868-645-4400.
make a ritual of the sunrise . . . jouvay
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2009 Scheduled Appearances by Tony Hall
A Jouvay Process Workshop - JPTP: January 29th to May 8th, hosted by Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut at Trinity in Trinidad Global Learning Site, Curepe, Trinidad, West Indies. 1-868-645-4400
Tony Hall will present a JPTP Paper on Play-Making at the III Forum Nacional De Performance Negra in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. July 6th to 9th 2009.
http://www.performancenegra.com.br
A Jouvay Process Workshop - JPTP: September 9th to December 18th, hosted by Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut at Trinity in Trinidad Global Learning Site, Curepe, Trinidad, West Indies. 1-868-645-4400
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Tony Hall's 2008 Scheduled Appearances:
- July 30th (A Reading), August 3rd (A Jouvay Process Talk and A Panel Discussion) - International Carnival Conference, York University, Toronto, Canada
- August 18th to September 6th (A Jouvay Process Workshop - JPTP) - University of Bradford, Bradford, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom. Phone: 07969968236
Email: create.change@yahoo.co.uk for further details.
- September 8th to December 18th (A Jouvay Process Workshop - JPTP) - Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut at Trinity in Trinidad Global Learning Site, Curepe, Trinidad, West Indies. Tel: 1-868-645-4400
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For readings, lectures and/or Jouvay Process Workshops by Tony Hall, performances by Lordstreet Theatre Company. Email: lordstreet@yahoo.com
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TONY HALL
Anthony Michael Hall (born July 16th, 1948) makes plays. He has campaigned extensively, as an actor, a director and a writer, in Western Canada with Catalyst Theatre, Edmonton, Alberta, in the West Indies with Derek Walcott's Trinidad Theatre Workshop, in the United States of America with Trinity College, Hartford, CT and Crossroads Repertory Theatre, Indiana State University. Terre Haute, IN. He has appeared in television dramas, documentaries and entertainment in Canada on CBC and ITV, in the UK on the BBC and in the USA on NBC. He has also worked with Banyan Limited developing community television and popular media in Trinidad and Tobago and the Caribbean.
Mr. Hall has taught drama at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad and at University of Winchester (King Alfred campus), England. He has been Visiting Artist in Residence at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut between 1998 and 2007, where he directed plays and taught courses for playwrights and film/videomakers. Tony has also been on-site Academic Director at Trinity College's Trinity-in-Trinidad Global Learning Site and at present teaches Festival Arts as Cultural Performance at the site. He divides his time between campaigning in North America and Europe and living with his family on the remote island of Tobago (area - 116 sq. miles, pop. - 55,000) in the West Indies.
LORDSTREET THEATRE COMPANY [LTC]
" . . . vibrating not under the earth but in our raucous, demotic streets . . . " Derek Walcott
LORD: the male principle
-STREET: the female principle
THEATRE: going beyond male and female
COMPANY: merging into one and dissolving into oblivion
In the 1990s Tony Hall and Errol Fabien launched LORDSTREET THEATRE COMPANY [LTC], 'The Hummers', "Peoples of the Sea" with the prize winning jouvay masquerade trilogy, A Band On Drugs (1990), A Band On Violence (1991), A Band On US (1992). The company takes its name from Lord Street, the seedy area in the city of San Fernando, Trinidad, where Tony grew up.
LTC muses on performance through Jouvay Process with Black Market Films, Maitri Moving Pictures and Vengeance Media, to produce popular media as Jouvay Digital and to produce theatre projects based on critical research into historical, political, social and contemporary issues in order to induce unconventional states of awareness and feeling in search of new possibilities for understanding and sensitivity. This work seeks to explore the mysterious and aboriginal subterranean depths of inter-cultural jamette consciousness and, at the same time, it wants to meditate on strategies "to convert reforms of the personal conscience into collective codifications of the public good".
LTC recently launched Lordstreet Foundation of the Arts and Playwrights Workshop [Trinidad and Tobago] to support artists and to encourage literary and fine arts projects in the idiom of traditional Caribbean culture.
"If yuh smart
Clear de way
But if yuh tink yuh bad
Make yuh play . . ." Mighty Sparrow
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"For every poet it is always morning in the world. History a forgotten, insomniac night; History and elemental awe are always our early beginning, because the fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world, in spite of History.
There is a force of exultation, a celebration of luck, when a writer finds himself a witness to the early morning of a culture that is defining itself, branch by branch, leaf by leaf, in that self-defining dawn, which is why, especially at the edge of the sea, it is good to make a ritual of the sunrise."
- From Derek Walcott’s Nobel Lecture, The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory (1997) -
JOUVAY PROCESS
All of Tony Hall's work revolves around a central perception, Jouvay Process. Jouvay Process, as a distinct and helpful perspective on living and being, may be a meditation on an awakening which manifests when principles of creativity embedded in the secret, subterranean, aboriginal, survival strategies of the emancipation traditions are mused on, probed or invoked instinctively.
Here the Caribbean experience of emancipation is used as an organizing principle based on the meditation that the state of emancipation is achieved in two very broad stages.
The first stage is the historic liberation from chattel slavery by the African peoples of the new world.
The second stage is an awakening to a spiritual transcendence of the mundane, physical, everyday existence of the illusion of the ego and its relationship to the oppressive authority and tyranny of the organized nation state. And 'jouvay', the name given to the opening 'ritual of the sunrise' at the dawn of the Trinidad Carnival, is carried as an enduring metaphor for the beginning or awakening to a distinct and unique human consciousness of fluid and authentic individuality as opposed to static, self-absorbed commercial individualism.
Today we concern ourselves with this second stage. Today we engage in the unavoidable life struggle (situation?) with this seemingly impossible and somewhat improbable second stage.
Jouvay Process is a natural, life awakening process, a dynamic of spontaneous popular culture, into which an ‘instinctive intervention’ is often made in order to make an art project or to realize communal art. Jouvay Process is usually mused on, meditated on or sometimes observed for a very long time before an intervention, instinctive or otherwise, happens.
Who knows how pan, the musical instrument of the steel band, happened? How did kaiso, the calypso of the word, or mas, that survival mechanism of everyday life, the Caribbean masquerade, happen? Jouvay Process. Take limbo dancing. Where did it come from? Jouvay Process. Who invented it? Jouvay Process. How does the dancer dance it? Jouvay Process.
JOUVAY PROCESS WORKSHOP [Jouvay Popular Theatre Process -JPTP] "finding the interior"
Jouvay Popular Theatre Process [JPTP] is a concept, an ‘interventionist performance/production model’ for seeing art happen. You meditate on Jouvay Process long and hard before an intervention or an application visits you. You have to be a long time witness to Jouvay Process before you can start to probe it because the probe itself comes over you spontaneously, when you least expect. It is after a long period of witnessing that you are automatically and forcefully driven to muse on a probe into the process. You see, this is not something that ‘you’ do. It is something that happens to 'you'. 'You' can never know how it is done or how to do it. And no one can tell 'you'.
Seven Elements of JPTP
1. The Gatkha Calinda School - the school in the emancipation traditions.
2. The Gayelle System - a curriculum of 'dance & fight' in the school.
3. Traditional Mas, Folk and Religious Character Manifestations - archetypes of behaviour as guides and guardians.
4. Dance & Fight Techniques - new and old approaches to 'dance & fight'.
5. Emancipation: Cycle of Creativity - the continuing circle of transcendence.
6. Jouvay Opera - environmental theatre, street & stage communal performance as ceremony.
7. Jouvay Digital - sight & sound movement, on screen rituals.
JOUVAY OPERA
Jouvay Opera [JPTP Version 2.40] develops out of the initial Jouvay Popular Theatre Process [JPTP] formulation. It is a combination of stylized action, kaiso/parang/calypso/rapso/chutney/soca singing and music, traditional drums and chants, pan music, 'speechifying', dialogue and mime, stick fighting (The Gatkha Calinda School) and dancing to represent stories or depict different characters - traditional mas/folk and religious characters function as guides or guardians and archetypes of behaviour - gladness, anger, sorrow, happiness, surprise, fear and sadness. These stories consolidate the strategies and energy of survival embedded in the many ‘emancipation’ traditions of the pre-, post and post-post emancipation eras. Costumes and sets in Jouvay Opera are usually handmade, in the aesthetics of the traditional mas, Camboulay (Kambule), Ramdilla (Ramleela), Hosay, Shouters an all the street traditions, from found materials.
JOUVAY DIGITAL
Jouvay Digital 2.30 [in cineMAS] is used in cineMAS to allow unusual dimensions of images in sight and sound to manifest. Emphasis is on improvisation, ‘extempore’, environmental, ambient sound and other documentary techniques. Two or more cameras with a preference for hand held movement and getting into small corners [tight and personal, claustrophobic] are the order of the day. Jouvay Digital 2.30 moviemaking process is about finding the interior, ‘the interior monologue’, meditation on the mas, the masquerade of everyday life, meditation behind the mask, revelation through the Emancipation Cycle of Creativity ‘to awaken’, ‘to jouvay’ ad infinitum in the moment through an exploration using all the new digital and inexpensive popular media technologies.
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JOUVAY INSTITUTE
This on-line institute is dedicated to the memory and work of Beryl McBurnie - The Ultimate Flag Woman. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beryl_McBurnie
Aims
1. To examine the premise that Jouvay Process is 'an awakening' which manifests when principles of creativity embedded in the secret, subterranean, survival strategies of the emancipation traditions are invoked.
2. To meditate on and bear witness to manifestations of Jouvay Process.
Objectives
1. To develop and explore, through research, formulations and popular methodologies in pursuit of frameworks for the widespread application of precepts and concepts related to manifestations of Jouvay Process.
2. To use the frameworks of Jouvay Popular Theatre Process [JPTP] and Jouvay Opera/Jouvay Digital 2.60 as a ‘performance/production model’ based on manifestations of Jouvay Process for deepening personal and group consciousness.
3. To make research findings widely available through publications, audio & video materials and popular media & performance.
Jamette Consciousness (jamettery) - a gateway or pathway or threshold to emancipation
- to awaken the latent wisdom and the acute sense of 'nowness' within by meditating on and practicing the 'Dance and Fight' techniques of the Gatkha Calinda 'batonnier' of the late 19th century underworld.
- to emancipate ourselves individually and collectively from all forms of slavery through invoking the energies of defiance nestled deep within the body and in the aboriginal land and sea (the old Arawak-Carib island bridge).
http://www.jouvayinstitute.lordstreet.net
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The poetics of jouvay is the poetics of emancipation.
Jouvay: a community awakening.
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"I am bound to war
With the sun on my face again
Kiskadee singing 'way my pain . . ." David Campbell
At the JOUVAY INSTITUTE we see Gatkha Calinda martial arts as traditional forms of play, combat, prayer, music, dance, meditation, games and drama. Everyone of our sessions begins with different aspects of Gatkha Calinda. In addition, this school of martial arts also sees in these traditions, platforms and locations for building approaches to play and performance. These are executed through, what in The Gatkha Calinda School is called, The Gayelle System. This system is made up of phases and approaches to finding, using and mastering appropriate weapons of 'Dance & Fight', finding the 'warrior' inside.
The Gayelle System is made up of:
1. Prayer: Humming/Doption on the Horizon [The Hummers]
2. Initiation: Weapon Circle (for beginners)
3. Warm up: Stretches and Salutations to the Sunrise
4. The Challenge: A call to War
5. Lavway: Song or Chant
6. Karay: Dance, Grandcharge
7. Bois! or Poui!: Fight or Attack
8. Pas: Bloodhole, Surrender
This system is according to a Louis McWiliams' formulation.
Some of the approaches and techniques discovered from musings on the age old traditions of 'Dance & Fight' through The Gayelle System are:
1. Drunkin' Sailor.
2. Wine for yuh lover.
3. Rhani Jansi.
4. Mammie Pappie (The Transgressor).
5. Rod of Correction (Mastife).
6. Woman of the Birds.
7. Glass Menagerie.
8. Bongo (A Dance of Death).
There is a lot more to be discovered through new and fresh explorations of this system.
JOUVAY INSTITUTE PROJECTS
JOUVAY INSTITUTE ran its first Playwrights Workshop in conjunction with the National Drama Association and Trinity College's Trinity-in-Trinidad Global Learning Site in the spring of 2003 and also initiated a Videomakers Workshop in selected secondary schools in 2002.
1. Playwrights Workshop (2003, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2009, 2010)
2. The Trinidad and Tobago Living Museum Project (Moriah, Buccoo, Moruga, Waterloo - Temple in the Sea, The Islamic Community)
3. Videomakers Workshop (Tranquility High School 2002)
4. The Environmental and Street Theatre Project with The Trinity-in-Trinidad Global Learning Site (Camboulay Riots 2001-2006 with Norvan Fullerton and Pearl Eintou Springer, Macqueripe 2003 with Michael Lee Poy, Ramdilla 2007 with Ravi-Ji)
5. Jouvay Process Workshops - JPTP sessions for professional, personal and/or group development. (Leeds, UK 2006; Bradford, Bradford University, UK 2008)
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Jouvay Process is an instinctive 'awkening' through which the mystical and transcendental energy of emancipation travels from century to century.
Jouvay Popular Theatre Process [JPTP] is the consolidation of the 'NOWNESS' of the mythopoeic forces in the emancipation traditions into oblivion through drama.
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For READINGS by Tony Hall, JOUVAY PROCESS WORKSHOPS - JPTP (Finding the Interior) and/or PERFORMANCES by Lordstreet Theatre Company
Email: lordstreet@yahoo.com
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"A House for Mr. Biswas"
Sunshine Suite Tobago
(Maroons Camp)
Invest in GREEN CORNER - your energy centre
“I invent nothing, it’s all there.” Joan Miro
"If something was wrong I told them what was right and left it to them." Frank Worrell (quoted by CLR James in BEYOND A BOUNDARY.)
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EDIT #4
Presented at Colonisation in Reverse: People's Art and Taking Back the Streets,International Carnival Conference, York University, Toronto, Ontario
July 30th – August 3rd 2008
Jouvay Popular Theatre Process [JPTP]
Abstract #2 (final)
During Jouvay, the early dawn opening of the
Trinidad Carnival, revelers cover themselves
in mud or paint and dance together to the
strains of the steel band (pan) and calypso
(kaiso) until the first sunlight. It is a
ritual symbolic of renewal, regeneration and
rebirth; a process of transformation in
which participants seem to transcend their
human form. This process we may call Jouvay
Process. But Jouvay Process can also be seen
as the continual manifestation of an
awakening in the everyday lives of people on
the islands as they emancipate themselves in
the new world. This manifestation
underscores a way of life that is reflected
in the masquerade (mas) of the carnival
days.
The JPTP model, derived from musings on this
Jouvay Process, was discovered out of a
desire to understand and describe, in
performance values, the mechanisms of
awakening and self-creation that are
embedded in the emancipation traditions. The
idea was to find a universal performance
model to facilitate ways to re-inject the
essence of mas creation into the community,
in a time when nascent capitalism is rapidly
changing the modes of making and presenting
the mas.
My presentation will introduce JPTP as an
attempt to produce a wide-reaching workshop
framework for personal and communal
intervention that would universalize the
processes of self-creation and group
mobilization which manifest in the Trinidad
Carnival.
EDIT #4
Jouvay Popular Theatre Process [JPTP]
Finding the Interior
“A sense of unity is more important to us
than an absolutely rigorous logic, and a
sense of unity with our own past seems of
particular importance.”
Ideology and Image (1981)
by Bill Nichols
Indiana University
Press, Bloomington
While growing up in San Fernando, Trinidad,
I could see the stress cracks of eternal
worry develop on my father’s dark and
dignified face as he disciplined me and my
brother. The simplest of situations became a
matter of life and death. I used to think
that as a person all of my natural instincts
and impulses could not be that wrong. There
must be some system or strategy or approach
to living that belonged to us, that was
indigenous to us, that resided comfortably
in our genes that would allow the five year
old, who is still attached to himself or
herself, to be. Later I realized this could
take the form of Bob Marley’s or The
Shadow’s “rolling stream”.
I slowly became aware over my teenage years
that I was being forced through a formal
system of upbringing that was an attempt to
detach me from my instinctive self
completely. I was being programmed to end up
between being diminished and detached from
an objective inner-self and a cultivated and
contrived, manufactured outer personality or
ego. Kamau Braithwaite in Caribbean Man in
Time and Space makes a case for focusing on
the inner processes engendered by the
plantation encounter rather than the
enforced outer accommodations. And Wilson
Harris talks about exploiting our “sleeping
resources”. Our history had been expunged
from the pages of the record books. We had
to look to what we had done instinctively in
the new land.
As an adult I feel the need for an
organizing principle that comes out of the
life of people in the social, psychic and
physical environment in which I find myself.
In an earlier time I used to wish that I was
part of some tribe where people performed
rites and rituals that directly intensified
their consciousness of everything that
touched their lives, everything that existed
in their world. I think my theatre practice
has been about that life-long search, fifty
five years of exploring.
I always wanted to be part of strong
entrenched systems of traditions and rites
which would underscore what I was, where I
was from, who I am and would guide where I
was going. It is probably this atavistic
tendency for tribalism, the identity of
belonging, this urge to belong in us, which
rules so much of our electoral politics in
the English speaking Caribbean. In my youth
I was looking for something solid, inherent
in my tribe; to rebel against, I suppose.
The truth is that we do practice rites and
rituals with a fierce intensity. All people,
whether they acknowledge it or not, must
engage this practice or else they cease to
exist or go crazy or both. However it is the
ambivalence about our immediate historical
experience that my search has led me to deal
with. This in-betweenity may be the real
place for our consciousness to dwell. It
certainly is where our awareness is. And as
Lloyd Best argued in the essay, Making Mas
with Possibility – Five Hundred Years Later
(1999), I quote: “Perhaps the conundrum is
unravelled if we regard the consistent
falling between as the core activity.” An
entrenched process of detachment, of
viewing, even self, as the other, is also
part of the new-world consciousness, the
make-up of the creole, the dougla, the
mestizo, the meti. Therefore if we look at
the Caribbean experience and are able to
arrive at this new place, we will be able to
encounter a people who went through a unique
experience which can only be deciphered if
we observe closely with eyes and ears that
have been shaped by the strategies invented
and systems created instinctively in the
environment by these people for their own
survival. Again, Lloyd Best asked in the
same essay: “How could we, on that account
alone, (the fact that we were brought out
‘to serve the purpose of business and
capital, to guarantee them a supply of
labour’) How could we on that account alone,
not have been entrepreneurs in human
development, innovating and creating anew in
the mere act of survival?” This Caribbean
existence of slipping between multiple
identities (playing mas) may be a cross-
cultural (Wilson Harris), inter-cultural
(Wole Soyinka), sensibility that can be seen
as an instrument to be used in a process for
negotiating tribal conflicts. We can become
professional ‘negotiators’ worldwide.
What, therefore, is the event or sequence of
events in the Caribbean historical
experience which clearly activates and
liberates the human spirit afresh? Is there
a single event which defines the
sensibilities of ‘entrepreneurs in human
development’, claiming the self for the
space in a way that takes into consideration
the entire experience and is able to look
unfettered to the future? The only
phenomenon I could find was the liberation
of Haiti, the process of the Haitian
revolution and their gaining of
independence, a totally new world process of
events according to CLR James. In activities
fraught with all the frailty of humanity,
war, rebellion, bloodshed, deception, double
crosses and crafty negotiations, Haiti
gained freedom from European colonialism to
become the first free black society in the
western hemisphere.
Haiti set me off on a particular track. It
led me to look at emancipation itself, the
post-emancipation era in which certain
established pre-emancipation traditions were
continued and new traditions initiated; let
us say from 1834 to about 1946 in Trinidad.
Starting from the 1834-38 so-called
‘apprenticeship’ to emancipation through the
systems and strategies of the ensuing riots,
Camboulay Riots 1881, Hosay Riots 1884, the
establishing of Emancipation Celebrations
1888, the Water Riots 1903, reaching right
up to the conflicts which established the
first trade unions in 1937, the publishing
of Black Jacobins in 1938 and later the
invention of pan and the gaining of adult
suffrage by 1946. This ‘corridor of time’
represents in Trinidad a definitive period
in which significant cornerstones in a
Caribbean civilization were laid. This was
the time when a place Columbus called
‘Trinidad’ was claimed by the ‘people’, in
their minds, on the streets. And the
ramifications of these events were felt in
some of the other Caribbean territories as
they were creating themselves through their
own efforts as well.
It is important to note that the annual
Emancipation Day Celebrations initiated on
August 1st 1888 were officially turned in
1927, by the colonial authorities, to
Columbus or Discovery Day Celebrations. This
put some restriction on the masking that had
developed on Emancipation Day and it forced
that activity by the ex-enslaved to slip
stream into the pre-lenten Roman Catholic
carnival that existed up until then as
mainly a French Creole carnival. A situation
came about therefore where the energy of
Emancipation Celebrations had no where else
to go but into the then existing carnival
with its developing traditions of jouvay,
shrove Tuesday, last lap etc..
So, right away, with not much more research,
I could see that ‘emancipation’ had to be
the organizing principle for which I was
looking. That is the foundation, the opening
(L’Ouverture). (Toussaint Louverture
translated literally into English from the
French means ‘all saints awakening’.) This
was a ‘jouvay’ experience, an awakening.
From then on anytime I am lost, unable to
figure out where I am or what to do or where
I am going, all I have to do is to meditate
on the word ‘emancipation’ and my awareness
is deepened to a new consciousness of
‘seeing freedom and bearing witness to
freedom’, the essence of ‘emancipation’.
This sets my spirit free once again on a
track of clarity like the one which the
founders of Haiti or the batonniers in the
little conflicts of the Camboulay Riots and
the Hosay Riots traversed. Even if that
clarity always proves to be temporary.
Emancipation here is based on the meditation
that the state of emancipation is achieved
in two very broad stages. The first stage is
the historic liberation from chattel slavery
by the African peoples of the new world. The
second stage is an awakening to a spiritual
transcendence of the mundane, physical,
everyday existence of the illusion of the
ego and its relationship to the oppressive
authority and tyranny of the organized
nation state. And 'jouvay', the name given
to the opening 'ritual of the sunrise' at
the dawn of the Caribbean Carnival, is
carried as an enduring metaphor for the
beginning or awakening to a distinct and
unique human consciousness of fluid and
authentic individuality as opposed to static
and commercial individualism. Today we
concern ourselves with the second stage.
Today we engage in the unavoidable life
struggle with this seemingly impossible and
somewhat improbable second stage.
When I started the search I looked at the
kaiso, the calypso, that folk language of
the double entendre, ‘saying one thing and
conveying so much else’. I noticed as
indicated by Professor Gordon Rohlehr in his
many books on the calypso that the art form
stands tall on pillars firmly planted in the
same emancipation traditions. For example,
when the Mighty Sparrow wanted to defend
himself against a gun charge ‘with intent to
wound’ in 1960, he sang a song called Ten to
One is Murder. The late Professor Errol Hill
in his seminal Trinidad Carnival: Mandate
for a National Theatre says that Sparrow
sang this calypso in court, in self defense.
A modern calypso composed and sung in the
idiom of the calinda stick fight chant (a
call and response technique) in self
defense.
Sparrow sings:
Well they playing bad
They have me feeling sad
Well they playing beast
Why they run for police
Ten criminals attack me outside of Mirama
Ten to one is murder
Way down Henry Street by H G M Walker
Ten to one is murder
About ten in the night on the fifth of
October
Ten to one is murder
They say how I push their girl from Grenada
Ten to one is murder
Well the leader of the gang was hot like a
pepper
Ten to one is murder
And every man in the gang had a white
handled razor
Ten to one is murder
Well ah back back till I nearly fall in the
gutter
Ten to one is murder
Just imagine my position not a police in the
area
Ten to One is Murder (1960) by Mighty
Sparrow
Here Sparrow gets the chorus to sing his
defense. In typical calypso tradition he
does not say it directly. And even though,
as Keith Q. Warner says, it may have been
‘mere creation for the sake of defense’,
this is not art hanging on a neutral wall,
like a painting in a museum or an art
gallery, a play in the safe confines of a
darkened theatre or a calypso in the
appropriate tent. This is a warrior in the
gayelle of a post-colonial court room in
1960 reaching back to Camboulay warrior-hood
to go forward to defend himself and keep his
freedom. He is invoking the spirit of the
emancipation battoniers by using a system of
creativity they invented. He is calling up
the energy of the originators of the calinda
of his ancestry to free himself. Once I saw
that I experienced another awakening.
another dawn, another jouvay, that
incredible ritual of the sunrise which opens
the Caribbean carnival. Jouvay is an
incredible awakening which brings us out of
the darkness before the dawn, through the
portal of the natural mystic of magic hour,
every Carnival Monday morning, year after
year, to a new consciousness of the mystery
of our selves and our community.
The word ‘jouvay’ means ‘daybreak’ in the
Trinidadian Creole language of the late 19th
and early 20th centuries. It comes from the
French ‘jour ouvert’ or j’ouvert’ ‘the day
opens’. A creation story is told if we move
carefully from the French to the Creole. So
following J. J. Thomas, who published his
very important book, The Theory and Practice
of Creole Grammar in 1869 (we are well
within our emancipation ‘corridor of time’
here) we will go with the word ‘jouvay’,
spelt j-o-u-v-a-y. Using the jouvay
experience, as an all abiding Caribbean
metaphor of awakening to self and community,
without which no Caribbean carnival can
happen, I was forced to conclude that what
Sparrow had indulged in, to compose and sing
Ten to One Is Murder, is a ‘jouvay process’.
Jouvay Process is a perception. Jouvay
Process can be seen as a meditation on an
awakening which manifests when elements of
the creative impulses or principles embedded
in the secret, subterranean, strategies of
the emancipation traditions are invoked,
mused on or called up instinctively.
Jouvay Process happens because we are
designed by and steeped in the rites and
rituals of the emancipation traditions.
Jouvay Process is the awakening of the
‘sleeping resources’ about which Wilson
Harris writes. These ‘resources’ are
cultural, ecological and of the ‘unfinished
genesis of the imagination’ (to use Harris’
own words).
Jouvay Process is a system of secret codes
in the practical day to day creative way of
life which emerges out of these
manifestations.
As a theatre practitioner I was now moved to
come up with a performance model for a
Jouvay Process workshop. This would have to
be a framework to convert the instinctive
creative and imaginative elements of Jouvay
Process from secret awareness to strategic,
consolidated consciousness, in community
person and artist alike, through use of the
imagination and using the notion of
‘emancipation’ as a never ending
transcendental ‘cycle of creativity’.
Jouvay Process is a natural, life-awakening
process, a dynamic of spontaneous popular
culture, into which an ‘instinctive
intervention’ is often made in order to make
an art project, to realize communal art.
This is a way to ‘codify’ Jouvay Process.
‘The stripped man is driven back to that
self-astonishing, elemental force, his mind.
That is the basis of the Antillean
experience, this shipwreck of fragments,
these echoes, these partially remembered
customs, and they are not decayed but
strong.’
‘The Antilles: Fragments of Epic memory’,
The Nobel Lecture
Derek Walcott (1992)
“. . . to convert reforms of the personal
conscience into collective codifications of
the public good . . . ”
Lloyd Best
Jouvay Popular Theatre Process - JPTP
The workshop framework or performance model
is what I call Jouvay Popular Theatre
Process – JPTP. It is the Jouvay Process
workshop. JPTP is an ‘interventionist
performance/production model’ for seeing art
works happen. I wanted it to be a framework
for personal or group development or for
training artists to deepen their craft and
their consciousness in direct relation to
everything on the ground around them.
If we look at the phrase ‘Jouvay Popular
Theatre Process’ we will observe that two
words ‘Popular’ and ‘Theatre’ have been
stuck in between ‘Jouvay’and ‘Process’.
‘Popular Theatre’ here is making an
intervention. Jouvay Process represents a
dynamic, instinctive, and by now, systemic
process, that is really a popular culture of
survival. As times change Jouvay Process
will indeed manifest new variations for our
survival. However once we become aware of
Jouvay Process and its functions we are
curious and we want to meditate on it long
and hard to better understand ourselves, our
community and our changing places in the
world. There may be, eventually, some ways
for us to even apply the process ourselves.
An application may pay us a visit. We must,
therefore, want to be intense witnesses to
Jouvay Process before we can start to probe
it. Then the probe itself will come upon us
instinctively. Indeed it can only be after a
long period of witnessing that we are
automatically and forcefully driven to muse
consciously on a probe into the process.
JPTP is conceived as a ‘shoe in’ to get you
into your own conscious meditation on Jouvay
Process. In a sense it is to set you on your
own journey or to facilitate the journey
that you might have already embarked upon.
What is Popular Theatre then? Popular
Theatre is a drama process which emphasizes
a series of creative exercises which
submerge the participants in an imaginative
exploration of their own popular culture for
deepening their consciousness of themselves
in the context of their social, political,
psychic, psychological, philosophical and
physical environment.
One theorist, Michael Etherton, argues that
the words ‘popular’ and ‘theatre’ form a
dialectic with each other. Popular means
‘participation’. Theatre means ‘art’. So
Professor Etherton says that the more you
participate in this activity the better the
art. But the more you participate the deeper
the politics also, so the better the art the
more articulated the politics. It is by
means of this stratagem that we can
consolidate in our selves the full, creative
and imaginative energy of the emancipation
traditions set down by our ancestors. In
this way JPTP can activate the liberating
power of our emancipation ancestry and
through self-knowledge lead to sophisticated
personal and group action. And so as Derek
Walcott said to J. P. White in an interview
in 1990 ‘the temperament and the spirit of
the poet would enter the spirit of
politics’.
Some Elements of JPTP:
1. The Gatkha Calinda School - the school in
the emancipation traditions.
2. The Gayelle System - a curriculum of
'dance & fight' in the school.
3. Traditional Mas, Folk and Religious
Character Manifestations - archetypes as
guides and guardians.
4. Emancipation: Cycle of Creativity – the
continuing circle of transcendence.
1. The Gathka Calinda School - the school in
the emancipation traditions.
If we expand on the mandate of the second
stage of a transcendental emancipation,
creative and meditative elements embedded in
the emancipation traditions can be brought
together under what I call The Gatkha
Calinda School. This is founded on the stick
fight traditions of gatkha, the martial art
used by devotees in the 1884 Hosay Riots and
calinda, the martial art used by batonniers
in the 1881 Camboulay Riots. This martial
arts foundation of the emancipation
traditions, The Gatkha Calinda School, can
be seen as traditional forms of play,
combat, prayer, music, dance, meditation,
games and drama. In addition, this school of
martial arts also sees in these traditions
platforms and locations for building
approaches to self development through
performance. The Gatkha Calinda School, in
its many rituals, secular and religious, can
stretch into social, political,
psychological and philosophical academies of
meditation. From these the theatre
practitioner can create development
exercises for any season
One of the major academies to look at is the
calinda itself; the stick fight of the pre-
emancipation Camboulay festival which was a
precursor to, and greatly influenced, what
later became the Trinidad Carnival.
According to a formulation by Louis
McWilliams the calinda can unfold in a
sequence of activities or stages. I call
this sequence The Gayelle System.
The Hosay Riots of 1884, like the Camboulay
Riots of 1881, happened on the island of
Trinidad. The Muharram Massacre, the Hosay
Massacre or the Jahaji Massacre, all names
used for the Hosay Riots, is the uprising in
which Shia Islamic devotees, to the
prophet’s grand son Imam Husain, and other
non-Islamic indentured labourers (including
a ringleader, Sookhoo, a Hindu), who were
brought to the island from India from 1845,
were fired upon (unarmed women and children
were killed) as they defied the colonial
authorities to preserve their right to form
public processions along the street carrying
tadjas in commemoration of Al-Husain.
The indentured labourers brought gatkha and
the tassa drum (a war drum) with them. These
became integral to their Hosay protests.
African Camboulay warriors, who had won some
concessions, a few years earlier, from
Governor Freeling to continue celebrating
their Camboulay, journeyed from Port of
Spain to San Fernando, according to the late
Trinidadian historian Ken Parmasad, to
appear on the streets in solidarity with the
Hosay warriors. Interestingly enough some
believe that the word ‘Hosay’ is a creole
pronunciation of Husain. Even if further
research does not bear this out, an inter-
cultural reality, which we should not
ignore, began in this period.
The practice of gatkha in the Trinidad Hosay
context should be codified (we have started
with the calinda) as part of the martial
arts foundation element in The Gatkha
Calinda School of JPTP.
2. The Gayelle System - a curriculum of
'dance & fight' in the school.
The Gayelle System moves into phases and
approaches to finding, using and mastering
appropriate weapons of 'Dance & Fight'.
‘Dance and Fight’ is how Narrie Approu, the
legendary traditional masquerader in the
Trinidad Carnival, succinctly describes mas.
Therefore deep and intense meditation on
calinda can lead students of this martial
art to varying levels of expertise that may
be identified by different colours of head
ties, red, green, yellow, blue, black, white
to indicate levels of mastery attained
3. Traditional Mass, Folk and Religious
Character Manifestations - archetypes as
guides and guardians.
Once I turned to find a ‘drama process’ (or
better yet ‘processes’) in the emancipation
traditions I was drawn naturally to the mas,
the traditional mas, which totally dominated
and thrived energetically in the Trinidad
Carnival till about the 1950’s. I found many
characters with sophisticated narratives for
physical performance, monologues, dialogues,
dance and ceremonial dramas. They ranged
from the Midnight Robber to the Baby Doll,
from Police and Thief to Nurse and Doctor,
the Belair Dance drama, the Burrokeet
ceremony, from Pierrot to Pierrot Grenade,
from Aboriginal Indian Masquerade, that
foundation of traditional mas, in all its
variations, to the Dame Lorraine plays in
the yard. The characters from the Dame
Lorraine plays entered the streets to create
the burlesque of the early jouvay. But the
drama and the characters were not the most
interesting elements of the traditional mas.
I wanted to know who were the people who
created these characters and why did they
play them? Why did the same person play the
same character or set of characters year in
year out? Why did certain families play
variations on a specific masquerade for
their entire lives, in some cases passing on
the legacy from generation to generation?
What were these people who were called
jamette’ – below the diameter of the social
order, really about?
There seems to be an acute sense of
‘nowness’ about the sensibility of the
‘jamette’ culture. There are many stories of
people of the carnival mentality who spent
their last money on mas costumes ignoring
their rent and school books for their
children, much to the chagrin of the
‘respectable middle class’. I even knew a
man, in San Fernando in my youth, Nasco, who
would build the crown of his Indian costume,
in his house, in such a way that he could
not get it out. He would have to break down
the house to get his masterpiece out unto
the road. This caused his family, who were
also costumed and played with him, great
wailing and gnashing of teeth in the yard,
every year. It seems the jamettes, of the
immediate post-emancipation period, lived in
an ‘immediate present’ of time and space.
For them it seems that in playing mas, that
in playing different people, playing
themselves and characters in simultaneous
time and space was a salvation not because
of the ritual or the ceremony, but because
it emphasized in their consciousness the
present, the here and now. The playing of
mas could remove them from an immediate
wretched past, from a future for which they
had no privileges to imagine, leaving only
the present in which they could transform
themselves through mas performance. It seems
to have been empowerment through a kind of
‘mindlessness’. Playing mas then became a
meditation, a Zen experience in space and
time. Zen Jouvay. Only young people of this
sensibility could have invented the pan. But
that is another chapter in the book.
My search eventually led me to elements of
the West African masquerade and there I
discovered similarities in the mas. Simple
things like, you cannot unmask the person,
and you are not supposed to say the
masquerader’s name, even if you know who is
behind the mask, exist in both the Trinidad
mas and the African masquerade. In the
African masquerade the person under the mask
becomes sacred; the whole masquerade is a
mechanism through which the spirit enters
the person. Certain maskers embody the same
spirit for their entire lives as a function
in their communities. Through dancing that
spirit they may warn of impending danger to
the community or just scare little children
into obedience. That is their masquerade to
carry. Many of the maskers belong to a
secret order and these secret orders are
mainly male enclaves. Some researchers even
see these secret orders as a way of
consolidating male energy and power to
maintain the established order in the
community. The African masquerade system has
many functions. What struck me here was the
power of pure masquerading which I knew
about from just growing up in the Trinidad
Carnival. But I had never trained a focused
gaze in this way on what we called ‘mas’,
which I could now see, after my search had
begun, was a new version, created in the
Caribbean, of the older sacred West African
masquerade form.
Next I turned my attention to the few old
traditional mas practitioners who were still
playing mas in Trinidad. What I gathered
from them was that they all had a deep
affinity for the characters they played over
and over with subtle variations. There was a
relationship between what they played and
their everyday lives. For example, a leader
of a gang of dock workers in the 1950’s in
Port of Spain would play some kind of a king
in the carnival. They had some profound
personal connection in their everyday lives
to how the individual characters functioned
in performance. And incidentally they all
designed and made their costumes themselves.
This they insisted was the tradition. All of
this led me further to understand something
fundamental about the characters. Leading
from what can only be called the spirit
possession of the African masquerade I began
to see how that system had replicated itself
in the mas in the Trinidad Carnival after
the repression of spirit possession in both
the Orisha and Hindu worship on the island.
Then, working with Peter Minshall in the
late 1980’s, I was able to observe him adapt
and transform traditional mas characters
through his own meticulous designs – the
basic bat, the Midnight Robber, the
burrokeet, the moko jumbie. I witnessed how
he incorporated history (particularly the
social and design history of the mas) into
the present reality of performance without
the hampering clogs of nostalgia. From this
I learned that traditions are most
meaningful when they transform and evolve
with the culture that produces them.
Therefore, I needed to take a second look at
the value of traditional, culture-bearing,
mas characters, who embody the history of
emancipation and the struggle both for self-
definition and independence. I was driven to
look with a greater intensity at characters
like the Midnight Robber with his rapid-fire
grandiloquent speeches of revenge and
imposing hat and gait; the Baby Doll with
his/her instant social action theatre which
insists, right there on the street of
carnival day, in shaming renegade fathers
into child support (Baby Doll was sometimes
played by men); the Bad Behaved Sailors
satirizing the gay abandon of the Yankee
sailor in drunken choreography along the
street. I went in pursuit of all these and
more.
What I started to understand from this
search was that, in our everyday Caribbean
performance culture, even though we try on
different characters for size all year round
(play mas) to deal with daily exigencies and
in that process we discover ourselves,
discover our inner strengths, everybody
possibly has a character or combination of
characters (since the lines are never that
clear) for which they have some specific
affinity. And because the character can take
a participant to a divine place which
connects him or her to a new ‘cross-
cultural’ (Wilson Harris) time space concept
of the universe, a refreshing, objective,
egoless inner-self can be discovered in the
process. Harris suggests that at least one
of our many selves has an ‘affiliation with
the divine’.
The characters, therefore, become guides or
guardians to empowerment and can carry
participants to their fundamental truth
which already exists within them. Immersion
in character became the cornerstone of JPTP.
And as I encountered different popular
cultures around the world through the
workshop, the character base broadened to
include not just traditional mas but also
folk and religious characters, thereby
embracing what each and every participant
brings to the process. In this way a new
time space concept of the universe is
pursued. Caribbean people were brought from
different places carrying with them this
shipwreck of fragments, these echoes, these
partially remembered customs, with which
they were left to create the Caribbean.
4. Emancipation: Cycle of Creativity – the
continuing circle of transcendence
- a revolutionary vision –
Transcending Reason and Logic
to ‘awaken’ or to ‘jouvay’
[ad infinitum in the jamette moment of
NOWNESS]
1. Relaxation & Imagination
(musing on principles of creativity)
Leads to a state of MEDITATION . . .
2. Observation & Concentration
(preparing the artwork)
Leads to a state of MANIFESTATION . . .
3. Possession & Characterization
(presenting the artwork)
Leads to a state of TRANSFORMATION . . .
4. Reflection & Discussion
(reviewing the artwork critically)
Leads to a state of LIBERATION . . .
5. Participation & Action
(living as being)
Leads to a state of EMANCIPATION . . .
and then forward to No.1 again
Relaxation & Imagination
(musing on principles of creativity)
Leads to a state of MEDITATION . . . etc.
‘A story refers life to an alternative . . .
Stories are one way of sharing the belief
that justice is imminent.’
Dispatches by JOHN BERGER (Race and Class, Vol. 48, July-Sept. 2006, No.1)
JPTP - a cross-cultural workshop based on an inter-cultural life experience -
This workshop takes its participants into seven spaces of activity:
[i] FIRST SPACE – Initiation, the assumption, a challenge
JPTP begins in a space of ‘initiation’ by
acknowledging The Gatkha Calinda School’s
principles of prayers, chants, play, dance
and fight in The Gayelle System of combat.
[ii] SECOND SPACE – Storytelling to find your guide or guardian
This second space assumes that the daily
life of each participant reflects the
essential drives and energies of any one or
combination of the hundreds of religious,
folk or traditional mas characters in the
emancipation traditions, seen as archetypes
rather than historical figures. Next,
workshop participants begin their search for
the right character or combination of
characters, for which they may have some
specific affinity (their daily “guardians”
or “guides”) through the telling of a story
which begins, “I remember a time when”. This
is a story, which may be based on an
observed pattern of happenings, of an
instant when an obstacle or barrier was
overcome by some unexpected revelation or
infusion of, what appeared to be, personal
strength. It may seem as though the
participant becomes somebody else in these
instances, assisted by a ‘guide’ or
‘guardian’.
[iii] THIRD SPACE – Finding your guide or guardian
In the third space participants go through a
range of theatre exercises and games, based
on the street performances and other
occurrences of the characters, to assist
them (theatre artists, students, community
persons or employees) in their discovery of
these characters as their ‘guides or
guardians’ which manifest in their everyday
life stories.
[iv] FOURTH SPACE – Exploring your guide or guardian
In the fourth space participants explore
discovered territory to better understand
the specific performance elements that may
constitute their ‘guides or guardians’ and
their relationship to the manifestations in
everyday life.
[v] FIFTH SPACE - Possessed by your guide or guardian
In this space, JPTP participants are asked
to create short, improvised dramatic
presentations based on their stories using
elements of the occurrences of their chosen
characters. In these presentations they must
play themselves, as the characters, in their
own normal everyday life situations. This
can be related to the process of spirit
possession, which is an important part of
the traditional religions of many of the
peoples who settled in the West Indies. The
traditional characters therefore, manifest
in contemporary stories through the JPTP
participants.
[vi] SIXTH SPACE – Green Corner: Your guide or guardian manifests
Take your stories to the street, GREEN
CORNER, the sixth space, “the performance
space” in the JPTP where “things” are
revealed. In a performance called GREEN
CORNER, the ‘guide or guardian’ manifests
through the participant. We see this
performance as trance, a ritual preparation
for the crossing back to everyday life, a
transition. Here an awakening, a ‘jouvay’,
is realized. This is what it means to see
jouvay by GREEN CORNER. It is a way for the
participant to better explore cultural
history and what their own lives may be
about.
[vii] SEVENTH SPACE – A Ceremony (optional)
JPTP can evolve into a collective creation,
a ceremony, a Communal Environmental and
Street Theatre event, a Jouvay Opera using
the Emancipation: Cycle of Creativity. The
stories created to explore the characters
are fused together collectively into one or
more ‘mas band like’ presentation(s), a
‘habitable performance metaphor’, preferably
site specific, to consolidate, in a
ceremony, the strategies of survival
embedded in the many ‘emancipation’
traditions of the pre, post and post-post-
emancipation eras.
‘I had no nation now but the imagination’
The Schooner 'Flight’, from "The Star-Apple
Kingdom", (1980)
Derek Walcott
Tony Hall
http://www.lordstreet.net
Wednesday September 10th, 2008
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SELECTED WORK by Tony Hall
1. OBEAH (1987) Lead Actor - A feature film by Hugh A. Robertson.
2. AND THE DISH RAN AWAY WITH THE SPOON (1992) (US Release date: 1994) Co-Presenter/Co-Director - An award winning Banyan Film for a BBC TVE Series.
3. JEAN & DINAH . . . [Who Have Been Locked Away in a World Famous Calypso Since 1956 Speak Their Minds Publicly] (1994) - An award winning LORDSTREET LiME for stage successfully performed up and down the Caribbean. First performed in the US(Hartford, CT., Hamilton, NY. and New York, NY.) in 1998, in Toronto, Ontario in 2001 & 2002 and in London, UK. in 2003. A French version of the play was performed successfully at the University of the West Indies Inter-Campus 8th Annual Foreign Language Theatre Festival in 2007 on the St Augustine Campus, Trinidad.
4. RED HOUSE [Fire! Fire!] (1999) – An award winning LORDSTREET LiME for street, first performed at Under The Trees, Normandie Hotel, St. Ann's, Trinidad.
5. MUD! 'a ritual in mud and percussion' (2001), first composed and performed at Trinity College, Hartford, CT. A Trinity-in-Trinidad/Lordstreet Theatre Company/Jouvay Institute Project.
6. TWILIGHT CAFE [The Last Breakfast] (2002), another LORDSTREET LiME for the stage, premiered on June 20th, 2002 at the Central Bank Auditorium, Port of Spain, Trinidad and won the 2002 Cacique Award for The Most Outstanding Original Script. A public reading was given at Artwood Theatre in Toronto, Ontario on March 29th, 2005. The North American Premiere was successfully given on May 16th 2007 by Rhoma Spencer and Theatre Archipelago in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
7. FLAG WOMAN (2004), a LORDSTREET LiME for radio. Blind Miss B, an aging "Flag Woman", reluctantly faces her demon [First broadcast by W.A.C.K 90.1 FM, San Fernando, Trinidad, W.I. on June 12th 2005].
8. MACQUERIPE [A Navel Operation] (2003), a site specific theatrical meditation at Macqueripe Beach, Chaguaramas, Trinidad, 2003. A Trinity-in-Trinidad/Lordstreet Theatre Company/Jouvay Institute Project.
9. AVOCAT [Waterfall of Re-Birth] (2009), an environmental street theatre installation based on the Peter Minshall's mas story, 'WASHERWOMAN and MANCRAB'. at the Avocat Waterfall in north Trinidad, 2009. A Trinity-in-Trinidad/Lordstreet Theatre Company/Jouvay Institute Project.
10. THE BRAND NEW LUCKY DIAMOND HORSESHOE CLUB (2004) – A Calypso Musical [Blues Kaiso in Jouvay Opera] with book by Tony Hall, lyrics and music by David Rudder, premiered at Crossroads Repertory Theatre (formerly Summer Stage), Indiana State University, Terre Haute and performed at Queens Hall, Port of Spain, for Carnival 2006. Lucky Diamond won the 2005 Cacique Award for The Most Outstanding Original Music.
11. DIN SHURU [day breaks] (2005) - A Jouvay Opera with story by Ali Pretty & Mary Anne Roberts, book & lyrics by Tony Hall and music by Jit Samaroo. A work in progress for Kinetika Art Links International, UK.
12. TABLE 17 (2007) by Arthur Feinsod was directed by Tony Hall as part of the 2007 Summer Season of the Crossroads Repertory Theatre, Indiana State University, Terre Haute, Indiana, USA. This was the World Premiere of the play.
**********************************************************************************************
“I, like Doc Johnson, believe that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”
Simon Lee, Trinidad Guardian, 25-04-04
**********************************************************************************************
WRITING by Tony Hall
a. For street & environment:
1. Butler Labour Riots (1985-88 with union workers)
2. Santimanitay - A Mas by Minshall (1989 with Errol Sitahal)
3. A Band on Drugs (1990 with Errol Fabien and survivors of drug abuse)
4. A Band on Violence (1991 with Errol Fabien)
5. A Band on US (1992 with Errol Fabien)
6. Camboulay Riots (2001- 2008 with Norvan Fullerton and Eintou Springer)
7. Macqueripe - A Navel Operation (2003 with student cast)
8. Avocat - Waterfall of Re-Birth (2009 with students)
b. For stage:
1. Stand Up for Your Rights (1982 with cast and mentally handicapped adults)
2. Play for Keeps (1982 with Jan Selman and cast)
3. Family Portarit (1983 a musical play with cast)
4. Monster March (1987 with script by Errol Sitahal and Dennis Hall, music by Andre Tanker)
5. Jean and Dinah . . . (1994 with Rhoma Spencer and Susan Sandiford)
6. Red House [Fire! Fire!] (1999 with music by Calliston Pantor)
7. Mud! (2001 one act with cast)
8. Twilight Cafe [The Last Breakfast] (2002)
9. Play Mas (2004 with Peter Minshall and 3canal)
10. The Brand New Lucky Diamond Horseshoe Club (2004 with music and lyrics by David Rudder)
11. Din Shuru [day breaks] (2005 with music by Jit Samaroo. A stage project in development.)
12. Sex-Worker (2003 ten minutes play unproduced)
c. For radio:
1. Flag Woman (2004 one act)
d. For screen:
1. Who the C.A.P. Fits . . . (1977 13 part TV series with cast)
2. Morral (1981 13 part TV series with cast)
3. Epiphany (1982 5 part TV series)
4. Stand Up for Your Rights (1982 TV drama with David Barnet and cast)
5. Walk Like a Dragon (1992 20 mins TV drama)
6. Moksha (1992 15 mins TV drama with Errol Sitahal and Christopher Laird)
7. Jean and Dinah . . . (1996 feature film script unproduced)
8. Yankees Gone (2002/2003 13 part TV series scripts unproduced)
9. Yankees Gone [The Jean and Dinah Movie Project] (2003-2009 feature film script with Mary Jane Gomes. A Black Market Films Project in development.)
10. Til Death Do Us Part (2003-2005 3 pilot scripts for TV series with Mary Jane Gomes. A Black Market Films Project in development.)
11. Riddum Rider (2003 feature film script in development with Machel Montano and Xtatik Limited.)
12. The Will (2005/2006 feature film script with Mary Jane Gomes. A Black Market Films Project in development)
e. Essays and conference presentations:
1. The Nelson Island Project (1986)
2. The Miguel Street Project (1986)
3. Jouvay - A Popular Theatre Process (1990)
4. A Theatre of Confrontation and Participation (1996Sunday February 4th and 18th, Trinidad Guardian)
5. Jouvay Popular Theatre Process [JPTP] (2001 The 3rd World Carnival Conference)
6. They Want to See George Band: Mas in Tobago According to George Leacock (1998 The Drama Review [TDR] Special Edition)
7. Jouvay Popular Theatre Process: From the Street to the Stage (2004 CARNIVAL: Culture in Action - The Trinidad Experience - Edited by Milla Cozart Riggio, Published by Routledge, New York)
8. Presented 'Jouvay Popular Theatre Process [JPTP] - finding the interior' at Colonisation in Reverse: People's Art and Taking Back the Streets, International Carnival Conference, York University, Toronto, Ontario, July 30th – August 3rd 2008.
9. A Jouvay Process Workshop [JPTP] at University of Bradford, Bradford, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom, August 18th to September 6th 2008.
10. Carnival Theatre Master Class at The Carnival Learning Centre, Ryde, Isle of Wight, UK, for all carnival practitioners on August 27th 2008.
11. Presented a JPTP Paper on Play-Making at the III Forum Nacional De Performance Negra in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, July 6th - 9th 2009.
f. Bibliography:
1. Carnival and English-Speaking Caribbean Theatre: Masking the Body in Trinidad [Ronald Amoroso's 'Master of the Carnival', Lennox Brown's 'Devil Mas' and Tony Hall's 'Jean and Dinah . . .'] by Sandy Kristina Stoll (2005 Universitat Stuttgart unpublished masters dissertation).
2. Re-writing Calypso as Feminist Discourse: Jean and Dinah "Take Over Now" by Andrea Davis (2003 an introductory essay in TESTIFYIN' - Contemporary African Canadian Drama, Vol. II, Edited by Djanet Sears, Published by Playwrights Canada Press, Toronto, Canada).
3. 'Jean and Dinah' by Christopher Pinheiro ('a personal and highly opinionated testimony on the world premiere without apologies' in Trinidad Guardian, Tuesday December 6th, 1994).
4. Fire! Fire! A Blend of Politics, Sex and Fun by Melissa Behrens (A review of 'Red House [Fire! Fire!]' in Trinidad Express, Thursday March 18th, 1999).
5. Penny Steals the Show by Petal Maharaj (A review of 'Red House [Fire! Fire!]' in Trinidad Guardian, Sunday March 14th, 1999).
6. 'Twilight Cafe' Worth Seeing by Raymond Ramcharitar (A review in Trinidad Express, Wednesday June 26th, 2002).
7. Our Very Special Diamond by Pat Ganase (A review of 'The Brand New Lucky Diamond Horseshoe Club' in Trinidad Express, Tuesday February 28th, 2006)
8. A radio review of 'The Brand New Lucky Diamond Horseshoe Club' at ISU SummerStage by George Walker (WFIU, July 18th, 2004 - http://www.indiana.edu~wfiuwalkerjulydec2004.htm#horseshoe).
9. Banyan Puts Pan in Focus by Gabrielle Hezekiah (A review of the short film 'Walk Like a Dragon' in Trinidad Express, January 3rd, 1997).
10. And the Dish Ran Away with the Spoon (A review by Gail R. Pool, Dept. of Anthropology, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, Canada, July 24th, 2000 - http://www.wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/showme.cgi?keycode=1053).
11. Return of the Flag Woman by Terry Joseph (A review of the radio play 'Flag Woman' in Trinidad Express, Monday 16th May 2005).
12. New Musical Opens to Packed House by Terry Joseph (A review of the calypso musical 'The Brand New Lucky Diamond Horseshoe Club' in Queens Hall, Port of Spain in the Trinidad Express, Sunday February 12th 2006).
13. A Kaiso 'Whodunnit' (A review of the 'Lucky Diamond' Indiana State University Production by Terry Joseph in Trinidad Express, Sunday April 25th 2004).
14. Trini Magic at US University (A review, in Trinidad Newsday, Sunday October 29th 2000, of a production of Derek Walcott's 'Ti-Jean & His Brothers' directed by Tony Hall at Goodwin Theatre, Austin Arts Center, Trinity College, Hartford, CT)
15. Wings of Change: Trinidad Carnival on the World Stage by Milla C. Riggio (A conference paper on 'jean and Dinah . . .' and 'Lucky Diamond' presented at University of Leeds, UK. November 2005.)
*** Interests: making plays for street, stage, screen, radio, etc.
Published writer: Yes
Freelance: Yes |
