18 March 1999, 870 words
Frankly, if I were a politician, I would refuse to give the Trinidad Theatre Workshop a building, too.
The members of the TTW have failed to realize that, in order to convince a politician of anything, you have to make political arguments. Instead, TTW founder Derek Walcott has railed about our "crass and indifferent" society and Caribbean governments not having a policy on the arts and Port of Spain being "a big village." Only in this last comment did Walcott begin to make a political case, since governments are usually willing to spend money to improve the image of their countries' capitals.
The trouble is, the TTW people live in that rarefied intellectual atmosphere where politicians know the average citizen, and moneyed people, do not breathe. Thus, even after Walcott won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Manning administration felt quite comfortable refusing his request for the Old Fire Station building because they knew there would be no political backlash. The UNC regime is similarly comfortable, and they have a right to be. Walcott's criticism of Caribbean governments for not having an arts policy is meaningless. In developed countries, such a policy exists because the politicians get political benefits from it - that is, there is a constituency which is influenced by such support and the politicians gain status by being seen as interested in the fine arts. No such constituency exists in the Caribbean islands.
You can get politicians to do anything by appealing to their vanity and/or insecurity. But theatre, particularly when it is as highbrow as the TTW, has no such leverage. Having said that, however, I do think there is a practical - i.e. political, in the widest sense - need for a real Centre for the arts. I have no belief in the inherent superiority of the fine arts as compared to popular culture - I do not, for example, believe that one necessarily finds more effective writing in novels than in newspapers - but I do believe that art is essential for a progressive and enlightened society.
This claim has, of course, been made ad infinitum by our painters, poets, playwrights and novelists. But I have never read one good argument in support of the contention. All such arguments start from the premise that "art is good". But that is a moral assumption and, since I am a committed atheist, I do not commit such intellectual errors. The moment you start asserting the superiority of some genre (that jazz is better than country, for example) or forms within a genre (that sculpture is superior to mas-making) you are being intellectually bigoted.
So the TTW, and theatre people in general, need to come better than they have. When the TTW points to the number of plays they have staged for CXC texts, they are on the right track, except that politicians don't give a damn whether students pass Literature or not. What the TTW needs to demonstrate is that making drama an actual subject in the nation's schools can help the Government to deal effectively with a range of problems, from violence to teenage pregnancy to drug addiction.
Take just the component of acting: to learn to act, you must learn to control your body, to let it exactly express the emotions you are feeling. There are few things a typical teenager is more anxious to learn. Through the discipline of acting, young people can gain more self-confidence simply by learning to enunciate more clearly and project their voice. They can feel more comfortable physically simply because their body language is more controlled. This alone might make them less ready to resort to fists and knives.
Or take directing: a director must always figure out why characters in a play do the things they do. There is nothing which fascinates human beings more than understanding the hidden motives of other people. It is the basis of communication, of individual power and of effective social interaction. A young person who learns this thus becomes a more civilized human being.
Most importantly, people are always more persuaded by action than by talk. Drama is talk made into action. In a school program with good scripts and good teachers, students will become more thoughtful, more focused, more tolerant people simply by being involved in theatre. And this will eventually affect the wider society.
These are all political arguments. Unfortunately, they are also all political arguments premised on a desire for positive changes in our society. I say unfortunately, because I am not sure that our politicians want a citizenry that is more thoughtful and more refined. They would instead prefer to get the youths brainwashed by making religion compulsory in schools. So I'm very much afraid that, as long as they continue looking towards the government, the TTW will remain homeless, just like the vagrants whom the powers-that-be and the passers-by all ignore.
Copyright ©1999 Kevin Baldeosingh