The benefit features Dr. Raul Ruiz Miyares, a professor of Afro-Cuban culture and history at Casa del Caribe, Santiago de Cuba. His lecture, "Cuba & Africanismo: The Making of Revolutionary Culture", will include slides and a video. The benefit also includes: spoken word, an Afro-Cuban folkloric performance, a Caribbean dinner, and a Latin, World Beat dance party, all on Friday, May 2.6 p.m.
IATI is a New York-based, nonprofit performing arts organisation, established in 1968, dedicated to serving both English and Spanish-speaking audiences of all ages. Its productions aim to be both play and provocateur, combining the prose of Gabriel Garc'a Marquez with the intrigue of Borges and Cortázar.
In creating Scourge, a full-length work of hip hop theater, Joseph digs into his ancestral roots to tell the story of Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere with a long and violent history. The piece's main characters are two Haitian-American kids who are torn between their Caribbean roots and urban America where they have grown up.
287 p., With a focus on cultural memory, this dissertation investigates French Caribbean women's plays and their performance at Ubu Repertory Theater, a pioneering French-American theatre in New York. After a theoretical introduction and a historical chapter investigating slavery and its remembrance in the Francophone Caribbean, each chapter is divided into two sections, the first examining the play, and the second its production at Ubu. The author relies on theories of collective memory and cultural trauma to read Ina Césaire's Fire's Daughters, Maryse Condé's The Tropical Breeze Hotel, and Gerty Dambury's Crosscurrents as plays that dramatize a link between the past (the Middle Passage, slavery, and sexual relations between enslaved women and white men) and present-day behaviors, attitudes, and pain. It is argued that these plays work to revise problematic practices of remembrance in France and the Antilles. These practices dissociate slavery from its local context; make the trauma of enslaved women's rape a secret; divide Antilleans of different races, ethnicities, genders, and social classes; and associate resistance almost exclusively with Haiti. In a second section of each chapter, the production and reception of these plays at Ubu are examined.
It ran for more than six years and playing one of [Desmond]'s barbershop cronies was a highlight of [Ram John Holder]'s long career. "It only had half of the audience of Desmond's, but it had much bigger audiences than the shows they replaced it with." In it, the colourful and exuberant traditions of Trinidad's Carnival provide the setting for a stage event which transforms Handel's Messiah into an musical combining song, dance and spectacle with the spirit of Caribbean storytelling.
Colorful scenes of the island of Martinique flashed across the screen in the semi- darkness of the Schomburg Center last Wednesday evening at the kick-off of the first annual International Caribbean Diaspora (ICD) Film, Theatre & Literary Festival. On the screen, the Caribbean scenery transformed into the riveting images of the popular, Emmy Award-winning, Tony-nominated actor Keith David in some of the films in which he has appeared, such as "There's Something About Mary," "Pitch Black" and "Requiem for a Dream." At the Wednesday evening screening, of "A Dry White Season," David introduced [Euzhan Palcy], as the audience enthusiastically welcomed the esteemed, brilliant, beautiful and regal filmmaker, who had flown in from Paris after literally completing post-production on "Les Mariées de lisies Bourbon" ("The Brides of Bourbon Island") a French, three-hour period piece set in the 17th century. Palcy introduced "A Dry White Season," a political drama set in South Africa during the apartheid era. The film, which stars Marlon Brando, Donald Sutherland, Zakes Mokae and Susan Sarandon, is a story that focuses on the social movements of South Africa and the Soweto riots. The film was "heralded for putting the politics of apartheid into meaningful, human terms." The film, which was heartily received by the audience, is a classic. It is still as timely today as when it was first release in 1989.
"I wanted to write a play that celebrated the journey of our parents," explains [Kwame Kwei-Armah]. "A lot of the previous plays tell us the old, grey story about `No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish,' but that isn't very entertaining. "Growing up, I had a big nose but when Afrocentricty came in the '80s suddenly I had an African nose," recalls Kwame. "[Chris Monks] is White and together we have a play that is accessible to all communities," says Kwame. "It's not just about Black issues, it deals with universal themes like love, feeling inadequate and beauty."
"[Daniel Beauxhomme] comes from the lighter skin mixed class," said Kevin Johnson, who plays Daniel. "It's the story of two different people from two different worlds falling in love. Fate brings them together and fate takes them apart. It's similar to `Romeo and Juliet.'" "In Haiti, it's very confusing. It's fuzzier than here (the United States). A lot of it has more to do with money and name than this," said Shirley Julien, who is Haitian. "And that's what the musical focuses on. Ti Moune means `little orphan' in the play. But, in Haiti it means `little person.' That drives the theme more because she doesn't have a real name. In Haiti every little kid is called ti moune." "I don't think that there is that much of a difference," said Julien, who is also the musical's choreographer. "It's just highlighted more. The division is put on us and we accept it. It's up to us to say `I don't believe this' and take time to learn about Haitians, Jamaicans and Trinidadians. Our commonalities are so much stronger and deep inside of us."
330 p., This dissertation examines the major works of Trinidad-born playwright Mustapha Matura, dealing with plays written from 1970 to the present. By considering the relation of Matura's work to Britain and Trinidad, it explores the complexity of identity performance in postcolonial theatre and the ongoing need for agency among diasporic communities. Postcolonial scholarship fully recognizes the significance of writing in the development of postcolonial identities, yet dominant postcolonial theory largely excludes theatre from discussions of that development. Given its aural and visual presentation and its immediate interaction with an audience, theatre provides a unique postcolonial moment through which audience members can survey issues of race and place in their lives.
