'Nobady Beats EXED! Nobady!' is the chant with which the EXED Community College ended their performance of 'Wacky News'. - Michael Sloley /Freelance Photographer SPEECHFEST 2002, put on by the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission (JCDC), featured an impressive and diverse range of speech forms. The event took place at the Jamaica 40 Village last Wednesday and featured speaking ensembles as well as solo performances.
There was storytelling, dub poetry, Shakespeare, the psalms and standard English performances. It was an evening of the best performances from the speech competition.
The evening also featured a special performance of the skit Wacky News. Wacky News was performed by the EXED Community College and received the award for best skit.
One of the very young performers who lit up the stage was Shanique Thomas. She performed the dub poem Gifted and exuded a lot of energy from her tiny frame. Shanique, with her tiny voice but a very big presence, boldly declared that so gifted was she that "small problem mi use mi common sense. Big problem, mi use mi capital sense." With skill like that, she is indeed special.
The first segment of the evening ended with Wacky News. The production was quite funny and featured several spoofs of news items. News, sports and the weather were all read by Orville Hall, who changed costumes to fit each segment. In the sports segment, they made fun of the Lennox Lewis vs Mike Tyson fight and featured Mike Tyson trying to get huge bites out of Lewis. Fun was also poked at advertisements.
Fewer performers took up the second segment. In the sonnets, psalms and Shakespeare segment, the two winners of the segment were presented together, although their entries had been separate.
Sheldon Sheperd, who had won three trophies for his performances in the competition, performed psalm 2, Sonnet X, and the mercy speech from The Merchant of Venice. These were alternated with Jhanelle Graham's renditions of Once Upon a Time and an extract from Romeo and Juliet.
Their performance was followed by Kenord Grant, who gave his rendition of Mutabaruka's meta-poem 'Dis Poem'. Grant's performance was powerful and it demonstrated why he had won his trophy. Grant also won the trophy for the best actor in the senior class in the drama finals. The trophy was for his lead role in St. Jago's multiple-award winning play Mixed Signals.
Then it was Ilene Raymond's turn to take the stage. Raymond gave three performances. She started with her own creation Jamaica 40.
Jamaica 40 presents a very authentic depiction of an old woman who is on a cellular phone, of course, telling a friend in 'foreign' of all the reasons Jamaicans have to 'calabrate' the 40th anniversary of their independence. Interestingly, the growing use of credit cards was listed as one of the things of which we should be proud.
Raymond's two other pieces were Louise Bennett's Rough Riding Tram and Jennifer Keane-Dawes' Freeness Mentality. Raymond displayed quite a knack for getting into her roles, presenting warm energetic personas with each piece.
The light tone of Raymond's work was continued by Jody-Ann Bowen of St. Andrew High, who performed Joan Andrea Hutchinson's Rover. Rover seeks to answer one question: 'A wha so pon daawg so?' The piece is a first person report by a dog of what a dog's life is like and why their loyal service is betrayed when so many bad things are likened to 'daawgs'.
Humour was then momentarily suspended with Patricia Haase's appearance on-stage. Her original dub poem, A Child's Cry, dealt with all manner of the carnal abuse of children, ranging from incest to buggery. To enhance the authenticity of her piece, she was dressed in a uniform and wore ribbons in her hair. As such, her appearance brought a single question, 'She's a teacher?' so young did she appear.
Good humour was returned, if only for a time, with Sophia Pasley's Church Chuckles. The prose piece, which won Pasley the class 6 trophy for the best mixed standard poem or prose, is a hilarious mix of church-related jokes. Pasley changed costume for each anecdote to increase the effect. She had the audience just short of rolling in the aisles when she stated that Jesus healed her 'blood clot'.
The evening was ended by the best production in the competition, the only one to have scored a full 100 per cent. This came from Kingston College, who performed their dub poem Pressure. The poem used a basic call and response pattern wherein as the different members of the ensemble spoke of a different kind of pressure, the others whispered the word 'pressure.' The poem also included characterisations from the middle class to the homeless. They all seemed to be feeling the 'pressure'.
