Imani Tafari-Ama | Honouring Dennis Scott, artistic icon

This is the first of a two-part article highlighting the critical contribution of Dennis Scott to the creation of a Caribbean cultural aesthetic and the challenges currently confronting cultural creatives, which are barriers to the sustainable future of the sector.

Dennis Scott was only 51 when he became an ancestor in 1991, but by then he had distinguished himself as a dancer, poet, actor, and playwright. He was an original member of Jamaica’s National Dance Theatre Company founded by the late Prof Rex Nettleford. Because of his prolific creative outputs, Dennis Scott is regarded as one of the most skilful commentators on the complexities of Jamaican life.

However, he also has tremendous regional and international reach because he spent a significant part of his career teaching at Yale University in the United States of America and is regarded around the Caribbean as the standard by which drama aspirants are judged. He is best known for plays like Terminus and An Echo in the Bone. As a theatre and poetry icon, he thematically ransacked problems he encountered in families and other social spaces, especially those that relate to violence and other expressions of conflict, in a search for justice.

As part of a raft of events celebrating the 45th anniversary of the establishment of the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts (EMCVPA), the Jamaica School of Drama (JSD) honoured Dennis Scott with the staging of Company Song, composed of excerpts from some of his known and not so known works. This performance ran over the first two weekends in November 2022. On the opening night of the show, Scott’s widow, Joy Scott, graciously welcomed patrons to the Dennis Scott Theatre at the JSD. In an emotionally charged voice she said,

“On behalf of the Scott family, I wish to thank you for continuing to honour the legacy of Dennis Scott. I was in tears as I heard the works because it has been thirty-one years [since he transitioned]!” Company Song, the medley of performances of the work of legendary writer and actor-director Dennis Scott, was directed by Eugene Williams, Dennis Scott’s former student. Both men shared the distinction of having been director of the JSD. The honouring tribute was enacted by the second- to fourth-year students at the JSD.

Continuing her welcome speech, Mrs Scott added that “Shakespeare said that the evil that men do live after them; the good is often interred in their bones. I put it to you that for Dennis, the good, thanks to your intervention and recognition, lives after him. My hope and prayer is that the Edna Manley College will continue to honour all those who have contributed their skills and talent to this wonderful institution and to let their good continue to live after them.”

Current Director of the JSD, Marvin George, put the Dennis Scott honouring initiative in context. He said: “When we were asked to make an offering for the Colleges’ 45th anniversary commemoration, we immediately knew that the only thing that we had to do was something in Scott’s name. That’s part one. Part two is that we also immediately knew that the person to direct the work was Eugene Williams. As a student of Scott and also because Eugene carries with him a long view of this institution, being here as a student with Dennis Scott, emerging as a tutor and lecturer and then director of the School [of Drama], Eugene is our Professor Emeritus even if this country never had that title.”

FULSOME

George was fulsome in his praise for Dennis Scott’s contribution to the creation of an enduring cultural aesthetic that has been influential for generations. As he elaborated in his review of the expanse of Scott’s influence, “many of us never had the opportunity to meet Dennis Scott in person, in the flesh, which is part of plenty people’s sadness, including mine. But what we do know is that we have an opportunity to meet him in spirit. That is, in the work that he has left us. Lucky for those of us who could collect stories from people who knew him in the flesh and tell it to us, which is what makes this moment so critical. There are four things in Scott’s work that we have to deal with.. One is Scott’s way of dealing with the ordinary with ritual and ceremony. Anything could become a ritual or ceremony for Scott. Like a red carpet on the floor in the middle of a dispute that ends in tragedy. Ordinary but heightened with good ritual and ceremony and made beautiful.”

George was alluding to the leading piece performed by the students. Entitled The Crime of Annabel Campbell, this was one of the few unpublished pieces in Scott’s repertoire. It addressed domestic violence triggered by infidelity, which culminates in the protagonist’s murder of her offending husband and his lover. The symbolic coincidence of the bloody outcome of the encounter and the prominent positioning of the red carpet in the living room speak to the everyday execution of violent disputes in Jamaica.

Further analysing the critical contributions of Scott’s work, Marvin George elaborated on the artist’s “search for aesthetic in us, that is to say, that he is asking us to give consideration to what it is about us that is beautiful and that we can aestheticise. That is the effort of An Echo in the Bone, for example. That is a play that unfolds through procession, not flashbacks. The third is, perhaps, economy. Scott is a poet, and unlike people writing essays and prose, and so on, he uses a little bit of words. But with the little bit, it punches, and there is power, and there is beauty, and it is always pregnant in the little bit. I don’t know if it is because he is a poet or if it’s because he is a dancer, where all you need is your body and space to make meaning, but in the little bit, there is power and beauty.”

COMMUNITY AND CONTINUITY

In wrapping his four-pronged summation of Scott’s theatrical strength’s, George concluded that “the fourth [element] is community and continuity. Anybody who could write An Echo in the Bone is concerned about conjunctures, what brings us here. If we know what brings us here, and we know what we is and so on, we will know how to forward. And it does not end in an Echo. It continues in Dread War for the Children.

“When we say that Scott is the offering for the forty-fifth, it is because we know that that invocation has to be made and that invocation has to be made for us, in our Now. That invocation is powerful and beautiful and we have to harness that. We have to find a way to offer it back to ourselves and then to the children who are also here with us. Because we know that this production is a gift, since we are looking for ourselves in this work, and to you as audience, who we hope will be entertained, and also realise the power and beauty that we are playing with and join us in it. It is a gift, it is a search, and it is also a catalyst.”

Marvin George made a public commitment to continue to honour Dennis Scott for posterity. As he indicated, “We are signalling that there is work that we will continue to do in Scott’s name. Beyond the naming of the [Dennis Scott] Studio Theatre, is recognising that in this region, we also have a dearth of people writing plays to give us this kind of beauty to work with. What we will also do is organise a play-writing programme or competition that will carry Scott’s name. The School of Drama will do that and ensure that what we are doing is writing Caribbean. That is what our business is.”

- Dr Imani Tafari-Ama is a research fellow at The Institute for Gender and Development Studies, Regional Coordinating Office (IGDS-RCO), at The University of the West Indies. Send feedback to imani.tafariama@uwimona.edu.jm.