Students at Green Island High School in Hanover recently won nine awards in the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission National Drama Finals for their performance ‘Stop Gender-Based Violence’. The play was improvised and choreographed by the students themselves during a series of GBV awareness and performing arts workshops led by Fabian Thomas and his team from Tribe Sankofa during March and April 2022. The play was directed by the school’s Drama Club Coordinator Shaurna Miller, with Thomas as Assistant Director.
The workshop series focused on exploring gender-based violence through the performing arts. It was run as part of a research project, Representing Gender-Based Violence: Literature, Performance and Activism in the Anglophone Caribbean, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and led by the University of Leicester (UK) in collaboration with the University of the West Indies.
This project is ongoing and has three main aims: to study how gender-based violence (GBV) is portrayed in contemporary fiction, poetry, drama, spoken word, and popular music, to generate new creative work on the theme of GBV, and to equip young people to take leadership in arts activism against GBV.
The research project team includes the following people: Gabrielle Hosein and Amílcar Sanatan from the University of the West Indies St Augustine campus, Sonjah Stanley Niaah from the University of the West Indies Mona campus, and Lucy Evans and Kelsi Delaney from the University of Leicester in the UK. The project partners are the ROOTS Foundation and Bocas Lit Fest in Trinidad and Tobago, and Tribe Sankofa in Jamaica. More information can be found on the project website and on Twitter @RepresentingGBV.
As part of the same project, another workshop series is currently taking place in Trinidad and Tobago, led by ROOTS Foundation TT, a youth outreach organisation led by Mtima Solwazi which uses spoken word as a catalyst for social change. ROOTS Foundation are working with young people to create a spoken word play focusing on GBV.
