- Winston Sill/Freelance Photographer
A scene from Tallawah.
Tanya Batson-Savage, Staff Reporter
IN LIGHT of Sunday's promising beginning, the fare on the second night of Tallawah was rather disappointing. The evening was dominated by performances by Rex Nettleford Hall of the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, with two performances by Centrestage Theatre Workshop.
Tallawah 2003 began at the Phillip Sherlock Centre, UWI, on Sunday evening. Competition paused on Monday, continued on Tuesday, and ends this evening. The tertiary institution drama competition ends on Sunday with the award winning pieces in The Best Of Tallawah.
Best of Tallawah will also feature a guest performance of Owen Ellis's poetic play Tick Tock, recently played at the Dennis Scott Studio Theatre at the Edna Manley College for the Visual and Performing Arts.
The Rex Nettleford Hall, UWI's newest hall of residence, contributed five pieces to Tuesday's competition. Four of them were monologues, three of which were stunningly unoriginal in performance.
CONTRIBUTIONS
Joan Andrea Hutchinson's De Hog Name Crowd began the hall's contributions. The wittily written work deals with the trials of a woman who accidentally feeds her hog 'aile a ole im' (making him very amorous) and her boyfriend 'aile a lef me'. This was followed by Louise Bennett's Tram Car, then Valerie Wright's Mek A Ketch Har. The latter creates a very similar scenario to Louise Bennett's Coward Man. In this case the persona is quarrelling about being accused of being a thief. All three poems failed to bring particularly interesting interpretations to the pieces.
To Stray or Not to Stray fortunately broke the monotony of those performances. Though the actress needed to slow down in her wanderings across the stage, the piece demonstrated witty writing and her performance was at least unaffected.
Rex Nettleford Hall's single play (to take great liberties with that word) was Border Lane. This piece comprised folk songs strung together with very thin wires hardly bearing any semblance a plot. It jumped from Mango Time into When Mi Roas Di Yellow Yam before cartwheeling its way to nine night pieces such as A Come Mi Dis A Come. The only good point of Border Lane is that the songs were at least interestingly arranged.
Centrestage Workshop contributed two short plays, both directed by Teisha Duncan. Both displayed a willingness to experiment with dramatic form. However, where conceptualisation was their strong points they paled in the performance aspect.
The first piece, Sonnet 140, was a dramatised interpretation of Shakespeare's Sonnet 140. Though the execution did not fulfil its potential, the piece was certainly intriguingly conceptualised. Of this, the use of statues (who came to life toward the end) was certainly the most interesting.
The second play, Bittersauce, was much less complex in conceptualisation but interesting nonetheless.
Both pieces dealt with love: Sonnet 140 with broken hearts, while Bittersauce showed the night before the wedding of a young couple.
