The Bahamas has a rich and robust theater legacy that is unmatched in the region. For the last half-century, The Bahamas, for the most part, can boast of having a vibrant theater scene - even with the bumps and curveballs experienced since 1973.
Bahamians have produced works that are not just world class, "but excellent and world class" in the words of Dr. Nicolette Bethel, anthropologist, essayist, poet, playwright and theater producer and director.
"Many things can go out to the world, but don't necessarily have to be that great - and truth be told, there is a lot of crap out there. But the excellent and world-class Bahamian productions are of award-winning quality," said Bethel.
Productions like the folk opera "The Legend of Sammie Swain" written by E. Clement Bethel as a ballet in 1968, and later as a folk opera in 1983. It tells the story of a disabled Cat Island man who falls in love with the village beauty and sells his soul to the devil to be with her.
Winston Saunders' "You Can Lead A Horse To Water" - one of the most critically acclaimed plays in the history of Bahamian theater, and is the Bahamian Greek tragedy based on a true case of a boy who killed his mother, and the lawyers who defended him.
"The Legend of Sammie Swain" and "You Can Lead A Horse To Water" were in some ways ripped from the headlines.
Dr. Ian Strachan's "Diary of Souls" looks at migration and the underbelly of how immigrants are looked at, received, and treated in The Bahamas. Again, a tragedy!
The more recent "Der Real Ting!!" musical took Eddie Minnis' songs and turned them into a musical.
Bethel's "Powercut" shows what happens in the dark. It was also made into an independent film and released in 2001.
They are productions that only scratch the surface of the many great Bahamian theatrical productions and plays that are good on a national level.
Theater in The Bahamas has been going on since the days of the Golden Age of Piracy, which lasted for 30 years between 1690 and 1720. The first skit recorded in the annals of Bahamian history was done by pirates, according to Bethel.
She said records also show theater for white society up until the 20th century, although it is known that theater was going on in Bahamian Black segregated society and was church-based and school-based, but no one was keeping record.
"Bahamian society was segregated up until the 1960s really and then started to become integrated - and that is really when they begin to trace what can be called the tradition of a national theater beginning, and the locus of that would have been The Dundas Centre for the Performing Arts (on New Providence), a community theater, dedicated to building community through culture, (providing) a home for vibrant performing arts companies, committed to the development of the performing, visual, audiovisual, digital and folk arts of The Bahamas," said Bethel.
For a decade, between 1960 and 1970, theater activity started to coalesce around The Dundas. Like the country, it was becoming more integrated with white and Black Bahamians performing together onstage and audiences were white and Black as well, together.
From the 1960s to the 1980s, there is the formation of a Bahamian theater idea - both on New Providence and on Grand Bahama; the theater scene was unfolding at the same time in both places.
In 1961, The Freeport Player's Guild was officially formed. It was the humble beginnings of theater on Grand Bahama with the first productions held at the Sea Craft Building ... ladies reportedly had to lift their gowns to avoid the mud as they entered the tin-roofed building. During performances, if it rained, the actors raised their voices to be heard above the pound of raindrops on the metal roof. If an airplane flew over, the actors stopped mid-sentence, waited for the craft to fly over, as the metal roof resonated, and resumed where they left off.
In 1971, the Regency Theatre was built opening with the guild's production of "The Importance of Being Ernest". The Regency Theatre became the performing hub of the Northern Bahamas.
Founded by the Freeport Players' Guild in 2013, the Young Adults Regency Drama (YARD) Group comprises members between the ages of 18 and 35 who are trained in all aspects of theater with the goal of continuing the tradition of live theater on Grand Bahama.
Gea Pierre, an at-the-moment comedic playwright, said she sees today's theater scene as striving, even though she said some people are of the belief that it's a dying art.
"The more you make it reachable and touchable, people gravitate to it," said Pierre.
"I think the '80s was the golden age of theater before everything else got people's attention [and] you could stay in your bed and watch until you fell asleep. The 2000s came in, and now there's a yearning for it. People want to see themselves on stage."
Pierre takes advantage of taking in productions wherever she travels in the world and said the talent pool in The Bahamas is on par.
"We definitely have a pool of talented Bahamians, and that has a lot do to with environment. Bahamians are colorful, creative, industrious people."
Pierre has been a part of the theater scene for approximately three decades, exposed to it at an impressionable age.
"When I was about 13, there was a group called Grand Bahama Players and I came on the front of their show to do poems which I wrote and just to watch them in their craft - community theater; [they received] no payment, [they just wanted] to advance the craft."
The 1980s saw two big watershed moments on New Providence when Winston Saunders becomes the chairman of The Dundas Centre for the Performing Arts and in 1981 established The Dundas Repertory Season.
From 1981 to 1999, The Dundas Repertory Season set The Dundas apart from The Regency. In those 17 years, The Dundas Centre for the Performing Arts put on a series of plays every single year on a monthly basis between January and May. People knew there was going to be theater at The Dundas. And it was like a community theater - each play ran for two weeks, 10 nights of performances, Tuesday through Saturday, then the next show would go up the next month.
That decade and a half plus two years of regularity and predictability was revolutionary in the national theater scene.
Bethel said that period enabled actors to be able to hone their skills in such a way that they became world class.
"From the 1960s to about 1990, The Bahamas was considered to be the leader in the Caribbean in terms of theater. Other places were leaders in other art forms like visual arts, or dance or music, but in The Bahamas, theater flourished because of this repertory season. It also meant that playwrights could get exposure, could get performances, could get performed. And it meant that the kinds of things that were being written were wide-ranging. We had a whole lot of different kinds of things," said Bethel, who is also a founder with Philip Burrows, of the theater festival Shakespeare in Paradise (SiP).
SiP was established in 2009 by Ringplay Productions and inspired by Burrows and Bethel's experience at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. SiP is designed to celebrate the best of the past while helping to share a strong future. The international theater festival is held every fall on New Providence.
The 1980s saw the emergence of all kinds of new playwrights - people like Winston Saunders and Jeanne Thompson and the late James Catalyn, Dr. Ian Strachan and Bethel herself, coming to the fore because they had the ability to dream.
Bethel said they did not have to write stuff that they thought people wanted to see. They did not have to write stuff that they thought people could appreciate. They could take risks. The result was all kinds of theater and Bahamian plays reflecting that richness with the likes of "The Legend of Sammie Swain", "You Can Lead A Horse to Water" and the full grand opera "Our Boys".
The one thing not being done during that period in time was classical work like Greek tragedy and Shakespeare.
Since its establishment, SiP has presented work by William Shakespeare, Bahamian classics, one-person shows about the African-American/Caribbean experience, and musical extravaganzas.
Patrice Francis, actor and playwright, has been involved with theater on New Providence for 34 years and has up-close experience with what Ringplay Productions creates and develops.
"Since 2009, Shakespeare in Paradise, a theater festival for Nassau and the world, has provided a platform for Bahamian actors, directors, writers, administrators and technical creatives to produce original Bahamian, regional and international works including some of William Shakespeare's seminal works. What's noteworthy is that 'Short Tales', a concept that Dr. Nicolette Bethel has given legs and wings to, has been single-handedly responsible for developing a cadre of emerging Bahamian writers, directors and actors. Based on the idea of calling for, selecting, and producing 10-minute plays by many first-time playwrights, the force that is 'Short Tales' has made it possible for Ringplay to produce an entire year of Bahamian theater as our tribute to The Bahamas on its 50th national independence. I am proud to be Bahamian ... creatively Bahamian."
Francis said what is most unfortunate is that they literally have to think, move and play within a box - the Philip A. Burrows Blackbox Theatre - because the larger Winston V. Saunders Theatre is out of commission.
"We have made countless appeals to the government of The Bahamas, the private sector and the general public, and continue to do so. However, on the eve of our 50th anniversary of nationhood, as we honor Bahamian playwrights (posthumously, in some cases), and feast on the amazing gifts of these creative teams responsible for mounting the works, we do not have the option of using the stage in a theater named after a Bahamian icon who lived, breathed and birthed theater - the late Winston Saunders. But will we stop? We cannot.
"Blackbox, larger stage, amphitheater, art gallery ... you name it, we must forge on. The next generation of Bahamian writers, actors, directors, producers and technicians are counting on us to persevere. After all, to be Bahamian is to be creatively resilient."
A quote Bethel likes is that theater and democracy emerged in the same place at the same time, so the concept of democracy, the concept of the power of the people, is very closely linked to the concept of theater because theater requires empathy.
It's a quote that does not necessarily recognize that theater is a very human activity.
"Storytelling narratives ... that's part of who we are as humans. And stories are meant to be told, but they are also acted out. So, theater is one of the basic things which human beings do in society that is a group thing. It is an in-person thing. It is a live thing. And it is in a real-time kind of thing. But what that means is that theater and the fundamental art of being human are inextricably linked."
Theater engages with the words part of the mind, the analytical part, the emotional part - all of these things together. As such, theater is ingrained in human societies, and ingrained certainly in Bahamian society.
The post A rich legacy in theater appeared first on The Nassau Guardian.The post A rich legacy in theater appeared first on The Nassau Guardian.
Click here to read more at The Nassau Guardian
