“You know, I think this shows that God is answering my prayers” – Headmaster Mr Marcus fixed me with a stern look, which seemed out of keeping with the outsize badge he sported in the middle of his tie – Teachers Make a Difference, in jolly typeface and bright colours. “I didn’t know how I was going to make this happen, I prayed to God, and now, you’re here.” And his stern face cracked into his characteristic expansive grin.
I was in Mabaruma Secondary School’s head’s office, having offered my services during our stay here. He whipped out a piece of paper showing a school calendar year with the 3 months to July sketched out with a rehearsal schedule for the National Schools Drama Festival. How fortuitous, I thought – 3 months is long enough to do some good work here.
Next morning, having spoken to the Education Ministry, I had discovered that we had 3 weeks, not 3 months. Blimey, I thought – but still – why not – its an opportunity to motivate the kids to take part with the possibility of a Georgetown trip ahead of them.
In the next 3 weeks, with a crazed look in my eye, I rehearsed 3 groups of children in 3 plays (one for each house in the school) at the end of which they were judged by the local great and the good at a “school drama festival”. And to realise that there hasn’t been drama here for 18 years made it feel like quite a meaningful event. The winning show was Chupucabra, by Guyanese writer Paloma Mohamed, an HIV awareness play which features a crisis meeting amongst all the vampires of the world (you’d be surprised how many there are) because the blood is going bad.
When they first read the play, most of the group hadn’t seen a script before. In the process of rehearsal we had been through various dramas – Abigail, a pretty 14 year old, in tears because she didn’t want to play Ol Higue, the Guyanese bloodsucker; Lennard threatening departure over creative differences, and our star, Denicia, playing the African vampire, Obayifo, unable to come to Georgetown as her family are 7th Day Adventists and so travel on a Saturday is forbidden. We got thru’ though, and on Weds 14th May, the group arrived in Georgetown, having travelled since the day before, overnighted in Moruca, used 5 different forms of transport, lashed by the wind and rain and all a bit sunburnt. And still smiling.
We rocked up to the National Culture Centre – a modernist theatre complex the equivalent of our National Theatre – and sat in the auditorium waiting for our rehearsal to begin. And we waited. And we waited.... After 4 patient hours we were told we could use the stage space for an hour. Travelling so far we had been unable to bring our set with us, so were cobbling it together from scraps backstage – at this point it was looking pretty sorry for itself.
We then had the worst rehearsal I can remember them ever doing. Its an ensemble piece, which had meant copious amounts of energy trying to get all the group focused and supporting one another onstage instead of drifting off, eating food, texting their friends or giggling. For my first rehearsal on the stage at the National Culture Centre, I came close to tears as my (admittedly sleep deprived) group proceeded to mumble, forget lines, yawn, upstage themselves and in the end (the point at which I had to stop them) hide behind a bench and giggle. Its was pretty mortifying. It was also the first time they had been into (let alone onto) the stage of a theatre, full stop, let alone a theatre of this size.
We trailed back to the YMCA despondent, and then began the strange procession of kids' relatives who wanted to take them off to visit other relatives, cousins, deliver crabs brought from Mabaruma, and various other important duties. I became increasingly frustrated, feeling that the children were more interested in running errands than in the piece they had come here to do, and also a bit perplexed. Why were there so many older male relatives wanting to take the teenage girls away? Where were the women in this, who usually carry the far heavier load of family commitment? Adolescent sex begins young here in Guyana, and its not at all clear to an outsider just what is going on, but I made myself pretty unpopular by insisting on HM’s ban on any children spending the night out.
Next day I went on a mission to borrow a steel drum for our show – I had managed to beg, borrow and steal all the other parts we needed (including a beautifully painted Silk Cotton Tree painted onto a flat). The steel drum was the last thing I needed.
I had tracked one down to the prison service –apparently they have a good band there. I am guessing they have time to rehearse. So next morning I went to the prison director’s Mr Erskine’s office to ask to borrow one. He was fine with me borrowing it and sent me with an escort round to Georgetown prison.
The prison is a grim, steel and barbed wire fenced compound in the middle of town. Tired and quite scary looking prisoners were lining up in handcuffs ready to go to court when I arrived, looking, I suspect, ridiculously out of place in my summer dress. There were a few proposals from prisoners (not all of marriage) which I studiously ignored, but couldn’t help being fascinated by the figures I saw running round the compound in the stifling heat, each with another prisoner riding their shoulders. What were they doing? Training as boxers, of course.
Heading with my drum back to the cultural centre, I met the kids, and we watched some of the others entries – they were good. I pointed out to the kids strong points in other performances – voice projection, characterisation. They nodded. Yes Miss.
It was coming up to our slot, and I gave them their pep talk. They were buzzy and excited, and so was I. In four weeks, we’d come a long way together. Behind the closed curtains we set up – our tree, the drum, benches taken from backstage, a huge bin borrowed from another show, a load of grass strewn about from the play before, and brilliantly, at the last minute, a stage hand turned to me: “you want a shallow grave?” I was hearing things. “Huh?” “You want a shallow grave? We got one”. Was this a Guyanese technical term? What did he mean? He led me to the back of the stage where, leaning against a load of flats was a foam gravestone headed with RIP. A shallow grave. Fantastic.
The curtain went up, I cued the music and over the system blasted “you wanna be starting something” by Michael Jackson. “Stop” I hissed over the cans. “Thats the wrong song, the wrong song – its Thriller – the bit with the scary man’s voice” “Sorry, sorry” the sound guy mumbled.
And so began our first and I suspect only performance on the national stage of Guyana. It was shambolic, it was halting, it was a bit giggly. It was also brilliant – it was the first time I’d seen this group of 15 kids from the remotest region in the country perform with costume, set, lights, sound. They looked pretty scared, but they carried on. They were nervous, but they got through it and started to have fun. They began to get a few laughs for their lines. They got off on the wrong line and managed to correct themselves. They were an acting company. They did really really well.
The show came to an end and they were called to the front of the stage. Up came one of the judges – he is a Guyanese comedian, I think, and had given feedback after each piece. He’d already had complaints from other teachers, but what he did to my lot was infuriating.
He gave a critique as if they had just appeared on Pop Idol and he was Simon Cowell. He flounced around the stage telling them off for not projecting enough, he made jokes at their expense, at one point he began mimicking one of the kids. Their body language went from glowing excitement and growing self esteem, to beaten looking and angry, regretting they had even come here. I was furious and complained to the organisers, as it seemed to me he completely undermined the purpose of the entire endeavour.
Anyway – my lot weren’t downhearted for long. I think there is a bit of a tough-love culture here, which the kids resist passively by secretly realising that these so-called authority figures haven’t necessarily earned that authority, and not really respecting what they say. What saddened me was that it might have undone all the work I had done in getting the kids interested in theatre, and so halted the rewards that were beginning to show through increased self-confidence.
We spent the rest of the trip enjoying the city – the National Museum, where an eclectic collection places a Rolls Royce beside a giant anaconda, and later to the zoo, where we were all transfixed by the real life anacondas, not to mention the mating tortoises and the spider monkey that had escaped and was running around on the roof. And when we get back to Mabaruma, I hope the group will form the core of a community theatre group in the coming months, or even, fingers crossed, years ahead.
I was in Mabaruma Secondary School’s head’s office, having offered my services during our stay here. He whipped out a piece of paper showing a school calendar year with the 3 months to July sketched out with a rehearsal schedule for the National Schools Drama Festival. How fortuitous, I thought – 3 months is long enough to do some good work here.
Next morning, having spoken to the Education Ministry, I had discovered that we had 3 weeks, not 3 months. Blimey, I thought – but still – why not – its an opportunity to motivate the kids to take part with the possibility of a Georgetown trip ahead of them.
In the next 3 weeks, with a crazed look in my eye, I rehearsed 3 groups of children in 3 plays (one for each house in the school) at the end of which they were judged by the local great and the good at a “school drama festival”. And to realise that there hasn’t been drama here for 18 years made it feel like quite a meaningful event. The winning show was Chupucabra, by Guyanese writer Paloma Mohamed, an HIV awareness play which features a crisis meeting amongst all the vampires of the world (you’d be surprised how many there are) because the blood is going bad.
When they first read the play, most of the group hadn’t seen a script before. In the process of rehearsal we had been through various dramas – Abigail, a pretty 14 year old, in tears because she didn’t want to play Ol Higue, the Guyanese bloodsucker; Lennard threatening departure over creative differences, and our star, Denicia, playing the African vampire, Obayifo, unable to come to Georgetown as her family are 7th Day Adventists and so travel on a Saturday is forbidden. We got thru’ though, and on Weds 14th May, the group arrived in Georgetown, having travelled since the day before, overnighted in Moruca, used 5 different forms of transport, lashed by the wind and rain and all a bit sunburnt. And still smiling.
We rocked up to the National Culture Centre – a modernist theatre complex the equivalent of our National Theatre – and sat in the auditorium waiting for our rehearsal to begin. And we waited. And we waited.... After 4 patient hours we were told we could use the stage space for an hour. Travelling so far we had been unable to bring our set with us, so were cobbling it together from scraps backstage – at this point it was looking pretty sorry for itself.
We then had the worst rehearsal I can remember them ever doing. Its an ensemble piece, which had meant copious amounts of energy trying to get all the group focused and supporting one another onstage instead of drifting off, eating food, texting their friends or giggling. For my first rehearsal on the stage at the National Culture Centre, I came close to tears as my (admittedly sleep deprived) group proceeded to mumble, forget lines, yawn, upstage themselves and in the end (the point at which I had to stop them) hide behind a bench and giggle. Its was pretty mortifying. It was also the first time they had been into (let alone onto) the stage of a theatre, full stop, let alone a theatre of this size.
We trailed back to the YMCA despondent, and then began the strange procession of kids' relatives who wanted to take them off to visit other relatives, cousins, deliver crabs brought from Mabaruma, and various other important duties. I became increasingly frustrated, feeling that the children were more interested in running errands than in the piece they had come here to do, and also a bit perplexed. Why were there so many older male relatives wanting to take the teenage girls away? Where were the women in this, who usually carry the far heavier load of family commitment? Adolescent sex begins young here in Guyana, and its not at all clear to an outsider just what is going on, but I made myself pretty unpopular by insisting on HM’s ban on any children spending the night out.
Next day I went on a mission to borrow a steel drum for our show – I had managed to beg, borrow and steal all the other parts we needed (including a beautifully painted Silk Cotton Tree painted onto a flat). The steel drum was the last thing I needed.
I had tracked one down to the prison service –apparently they have a good band there. I am guessing they have time to rehearse. So next morning I went to the prison director’s Mr Erskine’s office to ask to borrow one. He was fine with me borrowing it and sent me with an escort round to Georgetown prison.
The prison is a grim, steel and barbed wire fenced compound in the middle of town. Tired and quite scary looking prisoners were lining up in handcuffs ready to go to court when I arrived, looking, I suspect, ridiculously out of place in my summer dress. There were a few proposals from prisoners (not all of marriage) which I studiously ignored, but couldn’t help being fascinated by the figures I saw running round the compound in the stifling heat, each with another prisoner riding their shoulders. What were they doing? Training as boxers, of course.
Heading with my drum back to the cultural centre, I met the kids, and we watched some of the others entries – they were good. I pointed out to the kids strong points in other performances – voice projection, characterisation. They nodded. Yes Miss.
It was coming up to our slot, and I gave them their pep talk. They were buzzy and excited, and so was I. In four weeks, we’d come a long way together. Behind the closed curtains we set up – our tree, the drum, benches taken from backstage, a huge bin borrowed from another show, a load of grass strewn about from the play before, and brilliantly, at the last minute, a stage hand turned to me: “you want a shallow grave?” I was hearing things. “Huh?” “You want a shallow grave? We got one”. Was this a Guyanese technical term? What did he mean? He led me to the back of the stage where, leaning against a load of flats was a foam gravestone headed with RIP. A shallow grave. Fantastic.
The curtain went up, I cued the music and over the system blasted “you wanna be starting something” by Michael Jackson. “Stop” I hissed over the cans. “Thats the wrong song, the wrong song – its Thriller – the bit with the scary man’s voice” “Sorry, sorry” the sound guy mumbled.
And so began our first and I suspect only performance on the national stage of Guyana. It was shambolic, it was halting, it was a bit giggly. It was also brilliant – it was the first time I’d seen this group of 15 kids from the remotest region in the country perform with costume, set, lights, sound. They looked pretty scared, but they carried on. They were nervous, but they got through it and started to have fun. They began to get a few laughs for their lines. They got off on the wrong line and managed to correct themselves. They were an acting company. They did really really well.
The show came to an end and they were called to the front of the stage. Up came one of the judges – he is a Guyanese comedian, I think, and had given feedback after each piece. He’d already had complaints from other teachers, but what he did to my lot was infuriating.
He gave a critique as if they had just appeared on Pop Idol and he was Simon Cowell. He flounced around the stage telling them off for not projecting enough, he made jokes at their expense, at one point he began mimicking one of the kids. Their body language went from glowing excitement and growing self esteem, to beaten looking and angry, regretting they had even come here. I was furious and complained to the organisers, as it seemed to me he completely undermined the purpose of the entire endeavour.
Anyway – my lot weren’t downhearted for long. I think there is a bit of a tough-love culture here, which the kids resist passively by secretly realising that these so-called authority figures haven’t necessarily earned that authority, and not really respecting what they say. What saddened me was that it might have undone all the work I had done in getting the kids interested in theatre, and so halted the rewards that were beginning to show through increased self-confidence.
We spent the rest of the trip enjoying the city – the National Museum, where an eclectic collection places a Rolls Royce beside a giant anaconda, and later to the zoo, where we were all transfixed by the real life anacondas, not to mention the mating tortoises and the spider monkey that had escaped and was running around on the roof. And when we get back to Mabaruma, I hope the group will form the core of a community theatre group in the coming months, or even, fingers crossed, years ahead.
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