Reviews 2011
Reviews 2011
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by d’bi.young anitafrika
Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Extra Space, Toronto
November 29, December 1 & 3, 2011
“The Bird Woman”
With benu, the second part of d’bi.young’s sankofa trilogy, the setting moves from Jamaica to Canada. While blood.claat, the first part of the trilogy, focussed on menstruation as its theme and source of imagery, benu focusses on motherhood and motherlessness.
The hour-long play begins with d’bi.young crouched on a stool holding a large white cloth over her like a hood so that her face cannot be seen. It is a child playing a game? A woman cowering in fear? An ancient wise woman? Or is it some kind on unknown being? The answer, as the action demonstrates, is all four. The first incarnation we meet is sekesu sankofa, the daughter of mugdu sankofa of blood.claat. The fact that her mother lived in Canada was on of the facts that helped mugdu survive her ill treatment in Jamaica. Now we find sekesu waiting interminably in an emergency room in Toronto because she has been suffering tremendous headaches since the birth of her daughter benu. The play suggests that because doctors tried to induce birth in sekesu they gave her an epidural. In one in 100 cases the needle can puncture the dura causing cerebrospinal fluid to leak out. The consequence is a PDPH or post dural puncture headache which is severe and last days or weeks. From this point we shift backwards in time. In sekesu’s happy adolescence and pregnancy she was raised by her granny who ran a successful shop catering to the Jamaican community on Eglington. In the future the confused, emotional sekesu wanders the stage wondering where benu is. The question inherent in the play is how these three images of sekesu go together.
Alternating with sekesu’s story are sections of the creation myth told by her granny that sekesu loved to hear as a child. According to the story that d’bi.young acts out using only the white cloth as a prop, the Bird Woman, with the beak of a rooster, the head of a sparrow, the neck of a snake, the back of a tortoise and feathers of an eagle, nested in a sacred willow tree with a benben stone and laid an egg of myrrh. The Bird Woman arose from the ashes of her own mother and her destiny is to fly into the sun after she creates the earth and its inhabitants.
Those with a smattering of Egyptian mythology will find it fascinating that in modern Toronto a woman is telling her child a folktale whose origins can be traced back to ancient Egypt. There the sacred bird is male, burst from the heart of the sun-god Ra and came to rest on the benben stone, the most holy place on earth and prototype of all obelisks and pyramids. As the Egyptian equivalent of the phoenix, it was associated with time, resurrection and the sun. The key link between granny’s story and sekesu’s story--never mentioned in the play--is that the name of the sacred Egyptian bird is Bennu.
d’bi.young forces us to seek the connection ourselves. Knowing the myth, however, makes it clear that sekesu’s anguish lies both in missing the mother she never knew and in the daughter that somehow is no longer with her. Missing benu (or Bennu) is also a sign of sekesu’s alienation in Toronto from the spiritual sources of comfort her granny and her tales represented. At the same time, since Bennu is a phoenix, there is the hope that new live will survive sekesu’s mental combustion into ashes.
To communicate all the resonance of this story in only an hour, d’bi.young employed a more purely poetic language than in blood.claat. As in the earlier play she clearly distinguishes the many characters, male and female, black and white, with precise changes of voice and gesture. The transitions into and out of granny’s tale are especially breathtaking in their simplicity and power.
The many changes of mood are enhanced by the live music of Waleed Abdulhamid and Laurence Stevenson and by Michelle Ramsay’s subtle lighting of the symbolic willow tree set used for all three plays. d’bi.young brings an amazing intensity to her performances that no one should miss. Ideally, you should see the entire trilogy, but since each work is self-contained, you should do yourself a favour and this charismatic performer in at least one of these magical plays.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: d’bi.young anitafrika as sekesu. ©2011 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit www.tarragontheatre.com.
2011-11-30
benu (the sankofa trilogy, part 2)