Jamaica: Women's Theatre
The following is based on a newspaper article which first appeared in Caribeean CONTACT, Volume 9, No. 6 (October 1981), along with a report on the Women and Culture Symposium which recently took place in Barbados The Symposium formed part of the latest Caribbean Festival of Creative Arts (CARIFESTA 81) and was organised by the University of Barbados Women in Development Unit (WAND), in cooperation with the Barbados Ministry of Education and Culture and the Department of Women's Affairs. It marked the beginning of a one-year 'Project for the Consciousness-Raising and Mobilisation of Caribbean Women'. The stated purpose of this Symposium which lasted one day, was 'to show how women have used various art forms to express their reality and to examine how the methodology of cultural expression can be used for conscientisation and mobilisation of Caribbean Women'. In the morning short papers were presented by women working in the fields of dance, music, literature and theatre. Then there were practical sessions in the afternoon. These included a demonstration of various drama workshop techniques by Sistren and a ritual fertility dance performed by Miss Queenie Kennedy, Queen or Priestess of Jamaica's Kumina Cult Caribbean CONTACT is a monthly newspaper available from P.O. Box 616, Bridgetown, Barbados, West Indies.
The Sistren Theatre Co-operative is a group of Jamaican working-class women who use drama to analyse and comment on the role and position of Jamaican women in society. They are also committed to bringing theatre into the lives of the country's low-income communities.
All the women in the group are former street cleaners who come together under a Special Employment Programme introduced by the previous Manley Government. This programme was divised to try to ease the escalating rate of unemployment amongst Jamaica's poorest working class, and street cleaning was typical of the kind of work it offered. In an effort to broaden the work and improve the opportunities available to women, the local Women's Bureau selected a group of these workers for training as teacher's aides. Part of this training involved studying the use of drama in education and this was how Sistren was born. Inspired by their introduction to theatre as a means of education or consciousnessraising, some women volunteered to perform a short play at the first annual Workers' Week Concert in April 1977. They were directed by Honor Ford Smith, an actress and teacher from the Jamaica School of Drama, who later set up a special training programme for them at the School.
None of the women in Sistren have any high school education for they all come from the poorer areas of Jamaica's capital, Kingston. They each have up to four children. Scripts are always improvised and in the beginning they evolved out of taped meetings, when members gathered together to share and talk about their experiences as working-class women. Their first major production was Bellywoman Bangarang which explored group members' experiences with first pregnancies. It was very successful and shared first-prize with entries from Peru and Uruguay in Women's Mass Media compet i t i on for Women in Development. After another successful production, based on the problems of forming a co-operative and coping with law in the ghetto, entitled Bandaloo Version, Sistren moved on to explore the theme of women in Jamaica's
history, with Nana Yah, featuring the legendary exploits of Maroon leader Nanny who is the country's one national heroine. This was followed in 1981 by QPH, a play dealing with more recent history and based on a fire which broke out In an old people's home In May 1980, killing 167 old women. The play, descibed as a 'poignant protest against society's neglect of the aged', is a fictionalised documentary of the lives of three old women — their initials form the title — who end up at the home. To research the work Sistren talked to many survivors of the fire and also tried as much as they could to understand the physical experience of growing old. Finally, Sistren Is now researching a play about the plight of women domestic workers, focusing on migrant women. The Co-operative hopes to be taking this new production to Canada at the end of the year where they have been invited to go by the Canadian Domestic Workers' Association and several other groups.
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