–on the National Drama Festival

FOLLOWING the conclusion of the National Drama Festival last week, local thespians now await with bated breath the announcement of who emerged successful in their bid for the

best of the best.
These winners will receive awards for their efforts at an Award Ceremony slated to be held later this month, and though the winners have not yet been announced, Chairman of the Judging Panel, Al Creighton has said that while there are some areas that need to be worked on, this year’s festival has also shown significant improvements.

“In previous years, there was a problem with the editing, where plays were not stage-worthy, but that has improved this year,” he said, suggesting that the quality of writing among local playwrights has gotten better.
Moreover, he said the Festival was able to achieve a goal that they had tried developing in previous years, which was the establishment of Community Theatre. “We went out to communities for the preliminaries and had the participants perform their plays in front of members of their community,” he said.

The National Drama Festival 2016 therefore saw community theatre performances in areas such as Leguan, Parika, Sophia, St. Cuthbert’s Mission and Kuru Kuru.

NEEDED IMPROVEMENTS
Of course, as the critique judge, his job would not be complete without… You guessed it: Critique.
Al said improvements can be made in the use of set, adding that in a festival, where multiple plays are being held, constructed sets are not the most convenient, due to the time that it takes to build and dismantle. “There are new ways to use the stage; they don’t have to depend on always having to build a set, so that is something that can be worked on,” he said.

He noted, too, that there is need to improve in speech and projection, adding that too often, some of the actors could not be heard. In the area of playwriting, he said that while the writing itself has improved to make plays more stage worthy, there were many short plays that ran longer than their time, which suggested that better editing could have been done to tighten up the scripts.

Another area is the use of makeup. Al said that while modernist plays utilise makeup, plays which focus on realism tend to underuse it, and in some cases, this creates a look that is not characteristic of the roles being played.
Asked whether the National School for Theatre Arts and Drama (NSTAD), for which he serves as Administrator, could further help future participants to improve in these areas, he stated that the school tries to conduct workshops in Georgetown and around the country in order to do so.
“There are two ways in which we do the workshops. One is where we go into the areas, and two is where we bring people in. the Unit of Allied Arts helps a lot with bringing persons in to attend workshops and classes,” he said.
One difficulty with going to various areas, however, is the attendance of persons there. “Sometimes you go and you don’t find so many people. There might be three or five people who are interested. So we have to try to gather a larger number of people to attend these workshops,” he said.

OVERALL EXPECTATIONS
Overall, however, Al said that the expectations he held going into this year’s festival were met, especially with regard to the variety of plays.
While several groups focused on realist plays dealing with everyday issues, there was also a significant number of experimental plays.

“Those were the plays which used modernistic kinds of techniques and abstract ideas. We also had plays that represented indigenous stories and others which reflected issues that were unique to their communities,” he said.
For some time, there have been calls for Guyanese to pay more interest to theatre other than Comedy and NSTAD and the National Drama Company has been large supporters of this call. This year, Al was happy to note that there has also been improvement in the attendance at many of the plays, but stated that he hopes that in the coming years, this would increase.