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Bellywoman Omen: Navigating a world of challenges

Published:Friday | November 16, 2018 | 12:00 AMCamille Quamina & Marvin George
Students in performance for Belly Woman.
Students in performance for Belly Woman.
Members of Sistren Theatre perform at the Youth Upliftment through Employment YUTE programme for Orientation session in Denham Town in 2010.
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Sistren Theatre Collective's Bellywoman Bangarang, directed by Camille Quamina, is the most recent production of the School of Drama at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts and the second production for this semester.

At the time of finalising the production details, we were greeted by the announcement that the Ministry of Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sport had entered into collaboration with UN Women to develop a public education campaign, which, according to a Gleaner article, "seeks to empower women and men, confront old notions about a woman's place, and encourage behaviour change among women and men.".

It seemed to us that this coincidence was nothing short of fortuitous.

Regarded by many as the seminal work of Sistren Theatre Collective, Bellywoman Bangarang (1978) is about four young women who are coming of age in seemingly unforgiving circumstances. Their relationships with their mothers and caretakers are pressured by their burgeoning sexual awakenings.

As they learn to navigate the world of men, they find themselves giving birth to their fatherless babies as well as to their understandings and misunderstandings about womanhood. In this recent production, they seek to reclaim their stories from Bellywoman a female Jonkunnu masquerade originally played by men.

This is explored through dancehall, itself a predominantly male artform whose (dance) performance in the '80s and '90s is dominated by women. The confrontation leads to their lives being retold in and through the dance/s, triggered by the ritual of human interaction as seen, for example, in children's games and courting.

As the DJ plays the soundtrack to their lives, dancehall's treatment of women easily complements and amplifies the themes in the original play. Eventually, these women's re/birth is made manifest by their own act of life-giving.

 

Impacting Community Development

 

This is an 'epic theatre' as understood in the didactic style of the work popularised in the 20th century by Bertolt Brecht and at the same time in the enormity of these women's narratives as Caribbean circumstance.

Yet, it is birthed in popular theatre, which privileges interaction with community audiences on issues of community development. In this instance, it explores gender roles/politics in a contemporary urban context, revealing the misogyny and patriarchal system that sustains it. By the juxtaposition of and interplay between dancehall and jonkonnu as the main mechanisms for telling through which the drama unfolds, trauma is transcended through the power of sound/song and dance/movement.

This production reflects the commitment of the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts to educate artists who understand the value of making use of their theatre training to address matters affecting national development. This determination has led to initiatives in community outreach programmes such as our work in Waterhouse in support of the Citizen Security and Justice Programme (CSJP) and in education programmes at Joy Town, Trench Town.

Under the auspices of the Spanish Embassy, students and graduates of our School of Drama, we have made presentations of the classic works of Cervantes at prisons in Kingston and Spanish Town as one means of encouraging the inmates to design a life for themselves beyond their immediate circumstances with the hope, too, of grounding programmes in literacy that may form part their rehabilitation.

Other recent community interventions have included collaborating with Dr Danielle Nelson, the senior registrar with the Kingston and St Andrew Community Mental Health Services for presentations to college audiences and persons at their Windward Road facility.

 

Creating the Vision

 

Together, these represent one tangible response of the college to the final question posed in Bellywoman Bangarang, "So what we a go do?"

Art must bridge the distance between the world we inhabit and the one we desire. It must create for the nation communities of new understanding. In the end, it must help us take our place at the table where consultations on critical issues engage with the arts to create the synergies in which development of the arts and success of national policies walk harmoniously towards the world we design together.

This is the Bellywoman omen.

- Camille Quamina is a senior lecturer at the School of Drama at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts and Marvin George is the dean at the School of Drama, EMCVPA. Please send your feedback to principal@emc.edu.jm.