 Rashōmon, in Kyoto, Japan was the great southern gate of the city, now derelict where people left unwanted corpses and conducted other such unpleasant business. It had a reputation for harbouring thieves and generally, persons of disrepute. As a locale for storytelling or discourse on various forms of societal decay in literature or the performance arts, Rashomon is easily a good launching pad. The title was first that of a traditional short story that was subsequently made into a film in 1950 that became a classic and then subsequently into a play.
In 2016 Trinidad it is now an adopted play and the current directorial project of Dr. Danielle Lyndersay of the UWI Department of Creative and Festival Arts (known as ‘Dani’ to colleagues and students alike).
Dr. Lyndersay showed off two sword-props to be used in her direction of Rashomon during our interview in her office – which turned into an easy back and forth chat of several hours. She did this with what I gauge to possibly be the same fervour and intense enthusiasm for costuming and theatrical design as what she might have started out with, some four decades ago.
Dani has the kind of devotion to theatre that one has come to expect from studying people for whom the service end of their profession is the core of their daily motivation. She started out as a young teacher of theatre in Nigeria – which is a more intense Trinidad and Tobago in terms of the convergence of ethnicities, having some 350 languages and, today, more than 35 States in one nation.
Her long teaching and production career began at the School of Drama in the University in Ibadan, which was often literally and figuratively a place full of drama. It was there that she met and married her Trinidadian husband. Together they worked all over the country for more than 20 years. She described Nigeria and teaching theatre there as a constantly dynamic environment where, “knowledge and experience were channelled into plays based on historical and ethnic lore and struggle at a prolific rate.”
The concentration of ‘knowledge and experience’ courtesy of the Nigeria theatre scene made her fit into Trinidadian life seamlessly when her dramaturge husband, Dexter Lyndersay, returned to Trinidad in the late 1980s to take the job of Director of Culture. The 1990s were fast-paced career years where she partnered with her husband to bring drama and theatre to communities and villages around Trinidad and Tobago in programmes such as Youth Crossroads and Celebration Theatre. The birth and founding of the well-known applied theatre group, Arts-in-Action (AiA) now seems logical and a natural distillation of her collective professional life.
Along the way she held the Head of Department position for the Department of Creative and Festival Arts (DCFA), as well as a two-year sabbatical as the Head of Theatre Arts at the International School of Geneva, Switzerland. Throughout and still, as senior lecturer and now as adjunct lecturer, she teaches Theatre Design and Theory and Practice of Educative Theatre.
Having just a bit fewer responsibilities these days with her two sons now domiciled in Holland and Seattle with her seven grandchildren, she is back to writing and drawing.
In fact, a compilation of many of her personal photos and drawings was published in one hefty volume in 2011. It is entitled, Nigerian Dress, the Body Honoured: The Costume Arts of Traditional Nigerian Dress from Early History to Independence. And besides working on another publication, she has set about to partition three e-books from that one masterpiece work.
As the Arts-in-Action group runs self-sufficiently by highly competent actors and directors, Dani has taken up with coordinating The Cropper Foundation’s adult writers in residence workshops that are held every two years in Balandra, as well as an annual edition of the same, geared toward teenage writers.
AiA is currently touring and giving workshops in the Dominican Republic and St. Vincent, using a model of educative theatre that is based roughly on the concept of meeting people where they are in their lives and helping them to uncover the solutions to their challenges themselves. In trying to help me comprehend the premise of the success of AiA, Dani described several scenarios where a member of the participating audience might be invited to take on the role of a persona or play a character, be it that of a policeman, parent or pusher. In so doing and by way of the AiA guide/facilitator who would have previously done extensive research, the spec-actor literally finds a safe space to be that person and is then able to travel a path that leads to considered alternatives that can be taken into the reality of the situation for finding the best resolutions.
There is hardly a life that can be more satisfying and fulfilling than one spent in service of making others’ existence better. Notwithstanding, Dani also explained that the director, producer, actor in a play may be similarly changed when bringing a story or character alive each time. The comfort and challenges of the experience of drama and theatre allows participants to reflect on themselves, to go deeper into their story or role and ultimately to accept change and perhaps become a better person. As she described the internal elements, a likeness of the theatre process to the meditation experience came to mind. This brought a clear understanding of why after four decades of doing the same theatrical set of activities she is still as excited and devoted.
That feeling must be the same for members of AiA who are as loving toward the theatre process and its two fold tracks of benefits. Rashomon then, is another manifestation and packaging for the experience. As Dr Lyndersay and her team prepare to bring Rashomon to the stage, this is what they are hoping to accomplish again – to get an audience to share in the depth of considerations on society now and to enact change in their own lives from the gleaned meaning.
Rashomon plays at the DCFA for the first two weekends in April: Friday to Sunday, 1-3 and 8-10. (Friday and Saturdays 8pm and Sundays 6pm.) For ticket information call Maria at (868) 663-2222.
Rebecca Robinson is a writer and editor.
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