Simply Powerful Theatre.

In spite of the awareness that many of the performing arts groups attending Carifesta in Suriname this year did not come from homelands where regional governments have invested ( yes I said invested) in performing arts centers, the young people at Carifesta left nothing to be desired of their presentations. I think, though, that the organizers of Carifesta, which is due to be staged by Haiti in two years, will structure the events in a manner that enable more of the participants to see more of the performances of their Caribbean counterparts. Too many participants at Carifesta saw too little of the presentations of their fellow islanders, and this is fixable. It must not continue to happen.
 I managed, (as  the group I headed was performing elsewhere) to see only two performances: a splendid drama presentation put on by the Antiguan theatre group, a play titled After Nine Eleven, and a performance by the Nomads out of Jamaica titled Breadfruit is the New Bread.
 The Antiguans performed splendidly, but what I took away from the CCS Theatre Hall that night was the innovative setting of the stage. It was rather simple but tastefully evocative in its  objective of stirring up human empathy, a necessary component for the nature of the play and the cathartic quality of its theme.
Old school theater came with its clutter. The teaching back then was that if the scene took place in a ghetto, then the setting must  consist of actual constructed ghetto-looking shacks. Today it is possible to present that same ghetto scene and its ghetto atmosphere without dragging in creaking, twisted galvanize sheeting, and then spending an entire afternoon paying a carpenter to build replicas of ghetto residential areas on the stage, and then yet further having to demolish these replicas some  one hundred and twenty minutes later.
 When I was at UWI my drama teacher said to me: Loughlin, you do not need to build anything on the stage; people know it's a play.
 Thanks, Antigua, for stirring warm memories of  those words and those days in the university classroom, and especially for allowing me to experience, once again, the joy of seeing a simple stage setting aid marvelously in the telling your story through the performing arts.