Caribbean theatre runs in Dr Raymond Travis Weekes’s blood. From a young age, he was deeply entrenched in the theatre scene of St Lucia—following in the footsteps of his father, Allan Weekes.
“My father was a director of the St Lucia Arts Guild,” he says. “I grew up with my father for the first nine years of my life, so from very early, I was able to attend a couple of rehearsals happening in Castries. When they would go around the island staging productions, I would also sometimes be part of it—so that’s where the influence starts.”
The Guild had been established in 1950 by a group including the Walcott twins (Caribbean giants of the arts), Derek and Roderick, and Weekes’s father worked closely with Roderick on several creative projects.
Dr Weekes, who has for the past year been the Coordinator of the Theatre Arts Unit at the Department of Creative and Festival Arts (DCFA) at UWI St Augustine, took these childhood opportunities and ran with them. He performed in his primary school end-of-term plays, and by secondary school, he was writing and performing his own work.
He would go on to study Literature at the St Lucia A-Level College, and then won an OAS fellowship to study Theatre at the Jamaica School of Drama. While in Jamaica, he also got a degree in the Arts at The UWI Mona. All the while, he was writing.
“I worked at the bank for about two years, but I didn’t like it,” says Dr Weekes. The pull of the creative world was too strong.
“I continued to get more deeply involved in theatre, and in particular, Creole Theatre.”
From Jamaica back to St Lucia, he became very active in the local scene, where he was dividing his attention between writing, acting, directing, and producing.
His father had taken on the mission of bringing classical Caribbean drama to Kwéyòl-speaking communities. “He was translating some of Walcott’s plays into Kwéyòl - what you call Patois, and staging them; taking them to Martinique and Guadeloupe; and I was joining him.”
This interest in celebrating Creole culture through theatre and art would become a defining element of Dr Weekes’s work. It would lead him to a central role at the St Lucian Creole Theatre Workshop, to an appointment as Cultural Education Officer at the Folk Research Centre, and then to Barbados, where he pursued his postgrad studies at the Cave Hill campus, focusing on the work of Derek Walcott and how it reflected our Creole culture.
In 2017, he graduated with a PhD in Cultural Studies. By 2018, he made his way to the St Augustine campus, to take up the position of lecturer at DCFA, which has now evolved into his role as coordinator.
So, what defines “Creole Theatre”, and why has it been such a deep preoccupation in Dr Weekes’s work?
“We’re using the Creole languages—and that doesn’t necessarily mean French Creole. It could be English Creole languages. We’re using elements from the Creole culture, Creole cultural forms. The indigenous forms of the Caribbean,” he says. “So, for example, where I am from in St Lucia, we have what we call the ‘Kont’... It is a wake tradition, but it encompasses dance, storytelling, jokes, drumming, singing.”
Across the Caribbean, traditions like this reflect our shared history and culture, and Creole Theatre aims to utilise these art forms “with an intent to liberate us from the traumas of our history”, he says.
“By using the cultural forms and the language, we go into the history with a view of psychological liberation and creating spaces for catharsis.”
Having immersed himself into cultural art forms across the region, he brings these sensibilities to his work at DCFA.
“I think Trinidad is a ripe place for a multicultural theatre, because of the diversity that exists here,” he says. “Multicultural theatre meaning not just that we employ forms and practices from the various ethnicities in the society, but… we have to look at form. Calypso, for example, can provide a frame as well as so much material, themes, characters, settings. So, I think Calypso can work as a real solid frame for creating a form for multicultural theatre in Trinidad.”
Some of this work has already been happening, both in the local theatre community and at DCFA itself since its inception, and Dr Weekes hopes to help students further this project in using these cultural forms to create what he calls “powerful theatre”.
“What DCFA is doing is right up my street,” he says, “because it is part of a Caribbean initiative.”
As his tenure as coordinator continues, he would like to see that work pushed forward even more at DCFA, as well as strengthening their bonds with The UWI Film Unit, which he says already happens naturally due to the closeness of the two art forms. It is clear that his priorities involve building a closer-knit Caribbean creative community, where we can look to our arts and culture as a means of helping our wider societies understand where we come from and what our futures hold.
