12
UWI TODAY
– SUNDAY 3RD APRIL, 2016
THE ARTS
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
CelebrationTheatre
. 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 inHolland 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 helpme 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.
AQueen of Drama
Dani Lyndersay’s 40 years of theatre
B Y R E B E C C A R O B I N S O N
Rebecca Robinson is a writer and editor.
There is hardly a life that can be
more satisfying and fulfilling than
one spent in service of making
others’ existence better.
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.
Dr. Danielle Lyndersay
PHOTO: JOSEPH DRAYTON
