Opal Palmer Adisa is one of the busiest people in Jamaica. The titles attached to her name – professor, poet, cultural activist, feminist, and award-winner many times over – indicate some of her activities. They were used last week by a woman who...
Pitchy Patchy, the revue which audiences can enjoy at the Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts (PSCCA), Mona, for the next three weekends, elevates form over substance. That would be a criticism with most theatrical pieces; not so with...
Submissions for the 2023 Commonwealth Short Story Prize have opened. That was the news greeting thousands of people around the world, including many in Jamaica – interested parties and the writers who have entered, and perhaps been winners in, the...
Man has long believed in the power of music to bring peace to troubled minds and situations. Famously, playwrights William Shakespeare and William Congreve captured the concept when writing, in their respective plays, about music being “the food of...
The 12th production of the Jamaica Poetry Festival (JPF) staged by poet Yasus Afari and SenYAcum Edutainment was held at the AC Marriott Hotel, Lady Musgrave Road, on Sunday evening. It was a splendid affair, but that doesn’t mean it was without...
Despite the COVID-19 pandemic and the spread of monkeypox, many have left the current National Dance Theatre Company (NDTC) shows at the Little Theatre, Tom Redcam Avenue, with their spirits lifted. For them, a major company objective for the...
The first phase of a Save Ormsby Hall initiative which began some four months ago is winding down. It is “an immense project” says the conceptualiser, the well-known artist Laura Facey, who is spearheading it, and the movement to save the venerable...
“Welcome back to live theatre.” That was the greeting given by Marlon Simms, artistic director of the National Dance Theatre Company (NDTC), to the audience last Friday night at the Little Theatre. He was opening the company’s first full live...
On the face of it, the paintings of the late Cecil Cooper and the fiction of Ferdinand Dennis are unrelated. But the works of the two are featured together at the Olympia Gallery in Papine, St Andrew, and the creators both referred to as...
Although Robert Johnson Jr is an experienced playwright, with 15 plays produced in the United States and Kenya, he is treating his current play with extra special care. And it is taking him longer than usual to complete. He has been working on Bar...
At the end of its concert at the Church of the Good Shepherd last Sunday, the Jamaica Youth Chorale (JYC) got the ultimate accolade, a standing ovation. Minutes later, this Gleaner reporter and several others gathered around the JYC’s founder and...
Theatre is back. Hurrah! You lovers of the live stage now have a chance to see the first commercial play produced in the island during the COVID-19 era. On any evening, except Mondays, you can go to Kingston’s Little Little Theatre for Hide Your...
Of course, the National Dance Theatre Company (NDTC) did not die in the pandemic. But they had refrained from giving live shows for the past two years, so their return to the stage of the Little Theatre on Easter morning was a resurrection of sorts...
“CAN YOU imagine the surge in writing that will come out of the enforced isolation and increased anxiety of the COVID crisis?” That question was asked this week by Dr Rachel Moseley-Wood, head of the Department of Literatures in English at The...
JAMAICA’S CULTURAL and creative industries has been thrown a lifeline in the form of a stimulus package for COVID-19 relief. This is available for individuals and businesses which are registered with the Ministry of Culture, Gender, Entertainment...
(Part 2 of an article based on an interview with Dr Edward Baugh, author of a recent biography on Nobel laureate Derek Walcott. Part 1 was published last Friday.) BAUGH’S “FIRST encounter” with Walcott excited him, he told me, but it was really a...
(Part 1 of an article based on an interview with Dr Edward Baugh at The UWI.) “DEREK WALCOTT was one of the makers and changers of West Indian literature.” This was University of the West Indies Professor Emeritus Edward Baugh’s summation of the...
In a book that soars with poetry, American author and journalist Ross Kenneth Urken metaphorically describes his Jamaican nanny’s past as being “a fortified city”. But it was one he felt compelled to explore. This I learned when he and I chatted...
The past seven days saw two very significant events in Jamaican film occurring. One was the re-screening of an iconic movie; the other was the launch of a book on film. Had author and film-maker Perry Henzell been alive to celebrate his 84th...
February, celebrated as Black History Month, was chock-full of directly and peripherally related events and it ended in a week with an increased flurry of cultural activities. The three functions that I was able to attend included one on the...
On Sunday, various colleagues, friends and admirers of the late historian, essayist and poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite paid tribute to him in poetry, prose and music. The function held in the Neville Hall Lecture Theatre (N1) at The University of the...
Over the last 90 years or so, Jamaican ‘patwa’has gradually become a legitimate, even respectable language. That’s the essence of the thesis argued in the 2020 Philip Sherlock Lecture by educator and theatre practitioner Carolyn Allen last...
Though the Chinese involvement in Jamaican music is quite well known, many who have been attending Grounation 2020 at the Institute of Jamaica (IOJ) have been learning and expressing surprise about its depth and breadth. The Ninth Annual Reggae/...
“Where does she find the time?” would be a reasonable question for you to ask before entering the Jamaica Shopping Club Theatre on Cargill Avenue to see the current play, Hell and Powder House. The question would be about Dahlia Harris, who has...
In order to join in the conversations taking place this Black History Month, many people will be trying to learn a bit more about our national heroes. Their quest for information about the most popular, Marcus Garvey Jr, will doubtlessly cause some...
