Dear All;
The Trinidad Theatre Workshop, one of the oldest artistic institutions region, has launched a crowdfunding campaign. If you're already convinced that the Trinidad Theatre Workshop is worth saving and supporting, here's the Indiegogo link. https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/trinidad-theatre-workshop-the-journey-continues#/story
If not, read the article below, published in the Guardian today.
Regards
RR

Poor theatre seeks rich patron, quicklyRaymond Ramcharitar The headline is actually a tiny theatre joke. The term “The Poor Theatre” is attributed to Polish playwright Jerzy Grotowski: it means theatre reduced to its barest essentials.  As Grotowski put it: “There remains only the living man, that is the actor, who can transform himself for the others, the witnesses, and who can find a sort of relationship with these others, with the spectators.” The tiny joke is that there’s also another meaning: a poor theatre is one that's also flat broke. The Trinidad Theatre Workshop achieves the admirable and unenviable state of being both simultaneously. The TTW is as authentic, accomplished and essential as theatre gets in Trinidad (and the Caribbean). And it’s also broke. This might be a good place to disclose that I’m on the board of the TTW. I’ve been affiliated for the last two decades, and have been a beneficiary of TTW’s generosity. So this is self-promotion, but I’ll risk it. The TTW has been around since 1959. It was formed shortly after Derek Walcott came to Trinidad to direct a performance for the inauguration of the WI Federation. From that time, and remarkably for any institution in any country, it has survived continuously, sometimes through periods of hibernation, and in various incarnations, and some of the founders are still active. Today, in 2015, three of its original members – Albert Laveau, Eunice Alleyne, and Nigel Scott – remain active. TTW has unfortunately parted ways with Derek Walcott, but it continues to function independently, continues to produce new and old plays, run drama in education programmes, and train young actors, playwrights, and technical personnel. All this has been carried out from its headquarters on Jerningham Ave, Belmont, for the last decade. This might not be news to many of the people who read this column, but I’m guessing there’s a whole bunch of people who have no idea what the TTW means to Trinidad & Tobago and our existence generally. Among these are many young and old people have never experienced the magic of theatre, which is a national tragedy in itself. The TTW has created and produced some of Walcott’s most famous plays here and abroad, like the Joker of Seville, Ti Jean and Dream on Monkey Mountain, but it’s also produced other important Trinidadian work, like Eric Roach’s Belle Fanto, Errol John’s Moon on a Rainbow Shawl, when they were new plays, and other Caribbean playwrights’ work like Dennis Scott and Trevor Rhone. This alongside plays by Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett, and Edward Albee. That one Trinidadian company is capable of that range of work is remarkable, but even aside from its artistic prowess, the TTW is phenomenal. It is what could be called, in the literal sense of the term, "living history": an institution which preserves and lives its memories (in archival and oral form) from pre-independence to the present. With all the emphasis on preservation, multiculturalism, monetizing the arts, heritage awareness and cultural industries, you’d think this would be an easy sell to government, NGO and international funders. Unfortunately, it’s not, and never has been. A significant part of the TTW’s story has been its homelessness. From its start in 1959, it has never been able to find a permanent home, moving from the Little Carib, to the Basement Theatre at Bretton Hall, to the Old Fire Station at what is now NALIS, to its present location in Belmont. (I’m glossing, the story has bacchanal, but that’s for another time. I’m also writing the TTW’s history. Funding also needed for that, btw.) So despite its many virtues, a significant part of TTW’s existence has been a struggle for survival. Walcott wrote in the Guardian’s independence supplement of 1962 that, “In our ‘culture’ art has never been considered important. Now, however, it will be assigned the important role of contributing to a culture which has been formed almost overnight. What we will see now is the spawning of innumerable writers, poets, painters and playwrights determined, like the polyp, but much more impatient, to build a national culture. The dangers are obvious.” Maybe not so obvious: the overnight half-baked artists are much better hustlers and have essentially sucked all the funding up – $300 million went on Carnival this year. (And don’t get me started on CCA7. Where de Minshall book gorn?) The Carnival observation didn’t originate with me. Walcott would write a year later in the Guardian (Aug 31, 1963), “A national theatre remains an obsession of the professionally minded, but its definitions are usually idealized or obscure.… The enormous subsidy invested in Carnival is indifferent to profits, and any of the large prizes awarded to performers like calypso kings… would be enough to subsidise a small company annually.” Needless to say, it wasn’t. But TTW kept at it, and in 1966, a “Special Correspondent” in this newspaper (November 4) observed: “By now, Mr Derek Walcott’s Basement Theatre Group has become part of our cultural landscape. It deserves to be.” The recognition was not enough, and the after decades of struggle, the TTW went into hibernation when Walcott left for the US in the 1980s. It woke up when Walcott won the Nobel Prize in 1992, and surged forward on the strength of that. Now, 15 years into the new century, the TTW finds itself out of fuel. The building it occupies is for sale, and the TTW has launched an Indiegogo  campaign to raise the $2 million needed to purchase the premises, and continue its work. The link is: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/trinidad-theatre-workshop-the-journey-continues#/story. Give, and get your friends to give. The country is a better place with the TTW in it. END    

|    
   - © 2015 Microsoft
   - Terms
   - Privacy & cookies
   - Developers
   - English (United States)
 |