Reviews 2011
Reviews 2011
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by d’bi.young anitafrika
Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Extra Space, Toronto
November 4-December 4, 2011
“Return and Get It”
word! sound! powah! is the third part of d’bi.young’s sankofa trilogy about three generations of African-Jamaican women that began with the acclaimed bloot.claat and continued with benu. The first play focussed on mugdu, the mother of sekesu; the second on sekesu, the mother of benu; and now the third focusses on benu herself. The cyclical nature of the trilogy is reflected in its settings: the first in Jamaican, the second in Canada and the third with the Canadian-born benu studying in Jamaica.
benu is named for the Egyptian equivalent of the phoenix, but the surname of all three women also refers to a symbolic bird. The word “sankofa” in the -- language of Ghana means “return and get it” and the image of the sankofa bird of the Ashanti shows a bird with its head turned back over its tail holding the egg of the future in its beak. In w!s!p! benu has returned to Jamaica to study dub poetry and lives with mugdu of the first play. benu returns to get knowledge but also discovers the internal strife that led her mother to flee to Canada.
The play benu ended with the Bird Woman exiting into the audience to fly into the sun for rebirth. w!s!p! begins with d’bi.young entering from that same place to the stage as a priestess chanting “àṣẹ àṣẹ” (the energy of creation) to invoke communication with the spiritual world where we can perceive life as a cycle of birth, death and resurrection through the spirit of the wind. This spirit is Oya, who is also the spirit of change, transition and the passage from life to death. All that is chanted will come to pass in the course of the play.
The play’s action has three strands. The central strand finds benu being interrogated in a police station by the brutal Captain Brown. The 2012 elections in Jamaica have ended in the winner being assassinated and all who demonstrated on that day, including the Poets in Solidarity group which benu joined, have been rounded up to confess their involvement. A second strand involves a series of flashbacks showing how benu joined the Poets in Solidarity and featuring dub poetry from some of its most colourful characters. The third strand focusses on the empty rhetoric of the candidate for both the JLP and the PNP filled with platitudes but never addressing Jamaica’s real problems of poverty and unemployment.
When I last saw w!s!p! it was at the 2010 Toronto Fringe Festival and even though it was in a preliminary state and d’bi.young acted with the script in one hand, it still made a strong impression. A year and a half later now that the work is finished and having its world premiere at the Tarragon, I find that the balance between benu’s interrogation and the rest of the action has been lost. The satirical speeches of the politicians have been expanded but, more than that, the various poets of the Poets in Solidarity group have been given longer poems and sometimes two poems when one would suffice to convey a character’s personality and sociopolitical concerns. While it is great to get to know the member of poetry group better--the swaggering leader bobus, the streetwise single mother peaches, the historically-minded stamma and the blissed-out ex-student sage--the play would benefit if d’bi.young were to cut their contributions to one per person. In 2010 benu’s plight was foremost in my mind. Now I found I kept having to recall that her interrogation was the frame for the action and, in terms of the trilogy, its most important part.
d’bi.young is an incredibly magnetic performer because she is able to channel so much energy into her performances. Here with so much dub poetry, her own specialty, involved her performances are as much physical as they are verbal. w!s!p! encompasses the widest range of emotions, from outright comedy to sudden tragedy, and d’bi.young proves herself a master of all modes and expert at making instantaneous transitions from one to the other. Perhaps the most moving scene occurs when benu draws strength to endure her interrogation by recalling the rite of passage mugdu presides over in a forest to allow her to perceive all the ancestors that have preceded her and to realize she need fear nothing because they all exist to protect her no matter what may happen.
Toronto is the first stop in what is a world tour for the sankofa trilogy. It travels in mid-December to India and thence to the UK, South Africa, Europe Australia and the Caribbean. This is great news both for d’bi.young and for Canada. It is wonderful that a Canadian performer of such extraordinary talent and her work of depth and power will have such exposure. But is also wonderful that people everywhere she visits will have to banish their preconceptions of what a “Canadian” is like and what kinds of stories they have to tell. The good this will do for both the performer and her country is enormous.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: d’bi.young anitafrika as bobus. ©2011 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit www.tarragontheatre.com.
2011-12-01
word! sound! powah! (the sankofa trilogy, part 3)