Gareth Manning, Gleaner Writer
Left: Founding member of Sistren Theatre Collective, Lana Finikin, pauses for a moment as she reflects on the group's work in various communities across Jamaica. Right: Members of the Sistren Theatre Collective perform a scene from the acclaimed 'Belly Woman Bagarang' in this 1978 contributed photo. - Contributed photos
THEY ARE not like your usual women's advocates. They don't always make the news protesting against discrimination and abuse.
Instead, over their 30-year existence, they have been using a different approach to deal with gender issues - a route which has taken them across the length and breath of the island uplifting women where they have been down trodden and now giving even young men a new lease on life.
Meet the Sistren Theatre Collective, which has been bringing healing to neglected pockets of people in Jamaica through the performing arts.
Back in 1977, they were merely a group formed by a few teaching assistants who just wanted to participate in a school concert.
Hired to fix the system
"It was in the 1970s when (Michael) Manley had this vision of people participation. Around the world the Decade of Women was passed by the United Nations, so it was a good time for women and women's issues," founding member Lana Finikin remembers.
It was at a time when the Manley government began to recognise there were serious prob-lems with the shift system instituted in the island's schools and so they hired teaching assistants to fix the problems.
"Children were going to school with their siblings who were on the morning shift and they found that there was nothing for them to do. So they would play on the football field and get into trouble," Finikin recounts.
The Council for Voluntary Social Services asked stu-dents from the University of the West Indies to work with the children, but then chairman of the council, Basil Ferguson, suggested it would be best that women working with the Government Impact Programme - or what was better known then as the 'Crash Programme' - help with the children. The women were employed by the Government to clean the streets and other tasks often considered menial.
The beginning of the theatre
"So the women came from various constituencies to work in schools. But they had to sit a test. Some passed, some didn't. After the test, they were given a course with the Cultural Training Centre (now the Edna Manley College for the Visual and Performing Arts)," Finikin explains. Many of the women were mothers, she says, and so were able to apply their parenting skills to the process as they assisted with children in grades five and six.
But it was the group of teacher aids placed at the John Mills All-Age School that later became the group known today as the Sistren Theatre Collective.
"We were asked to help with the Worker's Week Concert at the school and we said OK, but we didn't know what to do," she notes. So they sought the expertise of musicologist, Dr. Olive Lewin, who taught the women some basic lessons in music and theatre.
"She (Olive Lewin) asked us what we wanted to do and we told her we wanted to deal with issues we dealt with as women." She took them through some basic exercises and in the end, the 13 women decided they would mime the skit.
Going into production
"On the night of the show, stage fright tek we and we seh we not going up there. But Olive Lewin challenged us and told us if we were booed in the middle of the performance, we could come down. So we went up," Finikin continues as she recollects on what were good times.
"In the middle of the piece, people just start to laugh," An encore followed. The audience's response was such an encouragement to the team, they wanted to do more. They went back to the Cultural Training Centre to learn theatre and under the guidance of Anna Ford-Smith, the women did their first production: Bellywoman Bagarang. The production that dealt with the issues of teenage pregnancy, mother and daughter relationships and relationships between men and women became highly acclaimed.
"After the first production, people started to ask questions about how we came up with the things we did, and that's when we decided we would do workshops dealing with the issues."
Their first assignment was in Hayes, Clarendon. It was only five minutes, but the response was overwhelming.
"During the five-minute presentation, one woman got up and said: 'But that is my life story. Who told you?" Finikin recalls. From that workshop, another production titled Iris Armstrong was born and the team's first documentary, Sweet Sugar Rage, was done. Sweet Sugar Rage mirrored the hardships women endured in the flourishing sugar industry and the communities they called home.
Giving women a voice
"We had gone back to Hayes to observe the conditions of women working in the sugar fields and their homes and communities. Most of them did the same work men did, but they were being paid far less," Finikin says.
Apart from that, safety on the job was non-existent. There were no water boots to walk through the murky dunder and there were no gloves to protect their delicate femininehands. At home, things were worse. There was no water, no light and not enough food.
"Out of the documentary, they were given gloves, water boots and a raise of pay - though still not equal to the men - and the women were able to get their names on (land) titles," Finikin says with a smile of triumph.
"All the things that women wouldn't talk about back then were put into production and it is out of our work that you have a Woman Inc., Women's Media Watch and the Association of Women's Organisation in Jamaica."
Therapeutic theatre
No longer performing themselves today, Sistren, with some funding from the Culture, Health, Arts, Sports and Education Fund, is using the performing arts to uplift six inner-city communities in tandem with the Citizen's Security and Justice Programme by making performers out of the residents. And so far, things have been going pretty well.
"Theatre is a therapeutic way of looking at our lives and and helped us to understand our relationships with our daughters, our mothers and the men we live with - our spouses," Finikin says.
Remember Patricia McCray? She was one of the recipients of Sistren's healing performance therapy and also one of the women previously featured here in Women-in-Charge. Because of their intervention, today this mother of four has found a way to give more to her children, her community and herself all at the same time. Previously unemployed, McCray now has a food handler's permit and does her own catering, while at the same time enhancing her performance skills as an actress by acting in and even producing community skits.
"In the future, I want to have my own food business and I want to be on Broadway," McCray expressed with joy in a Gleaner interview a few months ago.
Bu a women's organisation, Sistren has also spread its wings to help heal men, particularly young men through its male development programme.
For one group of young men in the inner-city community of Allman Town in central Kingston, there is renewed hope. A group of 20 young men who could have been shooting guns are now shooting photographs. Ranging from age 17 to 26, they are all now certified photographers and videographers with certificates from the Creative Production and Training Centre all due to a little help from Sistren.
The success of the programme has pushed Sistren to expand the programme to include 17 more young men from other troubled communities such as Fletcher's Land and Hannah Town in central and west Kingston, respectively.
But the work in the inner-city communities is running out of funds and will make its final curtain call in March 2008. These sistren only hope the Government, whichever party it will be, will continue the programme.
gareth.manning@gleanerjm.com
