“Blakka, how do you come up with these corny, cliché quotations?”
That was Honor Ford-Smith’s response when I told her I wanted to take a break from performing as an actor/comedian/dub-poet because I want to do more “arts for a cause instead of performing for applause”. Honor is an associate professor in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York, and she has known me for many years.
We were talking about my personal journey and why it might be a good idea to do York’s MES program. I considered replying with something like “Well you share much of the blame and deserve some of the credit, because my life’s a book that you’re helping to edit”, but even I had to admit that one would sound particularly cheesy. And I know she’d probably just throw up her hands in exasperation and remind me of how apt I am at being a creative idler.
So I tried to be serious. I told Honor about my desire to work on programs that offer young people opportunities to influence their socio-political environment through structured collective action. I told her of my “I&I GEAR” idea: Community intervention that employs art and performance in a process of social education for young urban males around issues of Image/Identity, Gender, Environmental Awareness and Reproductive health. And even if my little mental rhyme was more than a bit on the corny-cliché-quotation side; even if literarily it seemed a fragile tree, there was a firm root of truth in it.
Honor is indeed one many persons who have helped to influence the course of this river that is my life. But where and when did it all begin?
Kingston Jamaica, long ago:
I was like nameless, formless water; an aquifer being filled. There but not acknowledged, It started just two years before 1962; that watershed period in the colonial history of my country when Jamaica gained political independence from Britain. I was a baby barely weaned when I was delivered to Auntie Becca. That’s the name everyone used for Rebecca Williams, a case study in contradiction. Auntie Becca was a cantankerous fish monger with a violent temper, who was always eager to feed a stranger or help a neighbour, and equally disposed to causing shame and inflicting injury. She had no children of her own, but took in dozens belonging to her younger sister and cousins. I was one of the many she raised with her painfully confusing blend of tender heart and tough hand; her mixture of maternal affection and physical violence.
I was water waiting, anxious for surface until I met Phyllis Welsh. I met her when I was 9 years old, as my Grade 3 teacher at Trench Town Primary School. She was the first adult to affirm in me a feeling of worth and a sense of purpose. She laughed at my funny faces just like the children did and she praised my work. She also did the unthinkable. She visited my guardian at work to commend my behaviour and aptitude in school. Yes; the nice, decent teacher lady actually found her way to the crowded sidewalk in front of the Chinese shop at the corner of West Road and Third Street where Auntie Becca had her fish vending cart, to offer words of praise and recommendation. But Miss Welsh did a lot more. She organized field trips to the theatre and she put on tea parties at school. She taught me songs and choreographed dances and put me on a stage to perform. Miss Welsh was in her own small way, “decolonising” my personal education and shaping my life. She moved some heavy rocks and discovered a spring. I finally found surface.
The flow I became was strengthened by the other tributaries of me I discovered in high school. I became the school clown and resident comedian. There was, and still remains, a mango tree in the middle of the front yard at Excelsior High School. It was a place where students found shade from the sun and drank readily from a fountain of laughter. Many days I missed important classes as I poured myself daily into that pool, eliciting the loudest laughter with true stories about life with Auntie Becca; stories many classmates thought I made up. Those sessions provided a much needed catharsis that kept me balanced, and proved the ultimate training ground for my work as a stand-up comic.
I became president of the Drama Club and a member of the African Studies Club. I got elected into the very first Students Council and got into advocacy work. I started learning to challenge westernized Eurocentric notions of art, beauty, knowledge and divinity. I studied the philosophy of Marcus Garvey and embraced the Ras Tafarian doctrine.
By 1978, I was flowing positively with a sense of power, pride and purpose, and my personal course gushed forward freely. That was the year I entered the Jamaica School of Drama and washed upon ideas about the arts as a tool for empowerment and transformation.
There, my currents were quickened and my surges strengthened by my encounter with the concept of Popular Education through courses in Drama-in-Education and Community Drama. So between 1978 and 1981, I studied in an institution that took pride in a “unique tripartite programme”. One geared towards preparing graduates to:
- Practice theatre at the highest professional level,
- Teach theatre to students from kindergarten to secondary levels of the educational system
- Use theatre in formal and informal education for community development and social change.
Honor Ford-Smith was one my lecturers then. And I remember well, one of her classes. It was October 1978. As part of a street theatre experiment, she made the entire class gather at the Simon Bolivar statue at National Heroes Circle in Kingston, dressed only in black garbage bags. We beat old cans, made a raucous noise and quickly assembled a crowd. We then proceeded to create characters and situations and perform short scenes based on ideas suggested by the audience; and engaged them in a discussion to evaluate the experience. I also remember that it was during the processing discussion after an intense improvisational exercise in another of her classes that I was first made to grappled with the concept of staged performance as “acting in solidarity” with a community or a cause. Her introduction of what I considered a highly politicised concept into a discourse about characterization and theatrical improvisation, broke new ground in my thinking, and broadened my course.
Upon graduation I was invited to be a founding member of Graduate Theatre Company - the school’s Community Theatre and Popular Education outreach arm. Graduate Theatre Company was later renamed Groundwork Theatre Company and established an enviable reputation as a dynamic development NGO doing pioneering work with youth in schools and community settings around the Caribbean. I later left the company to teach Drama, English Language and English Literature in the secondary school system for a couple of years; before ending up teaching the Community Drama, course at the Drama school, from 1993 to 2004.
Community Drama 1 explores drama as a vehicle for highlighting, exposing and discussing social and political issues; and examines forms like street theatre and forum theatre. Community Drama 2 looks at arts intervention, group facilitation and community animation strategies for education/development.
Swirling around also, in that larger body of my moving stream, is my whirlpool of a career as an actor/comedian/writer/musician – a pulsing pond often gushing glamorous but increasingly becoming unfulfilling. At the most visible surface of this surging circle perhaps, is the comedy duo called Bello & Blakka.
I met Winston “Bello” Bell in the early 70s when we competed for our respective high schools in the annual secondary school’s drama festival. We first worked together at a workshop in 1976 and met again at the Drama school in 1978. We quickly discovered common artistic and spiritual affinities. We also developed a keen sense of creative compatibility working on many collaborative projects. Bello brought his guitar, an amazing voice and riveting stage presence. I offered metaphors and symbolism and comic sensibilities. And we both carried reservoirs of ideas from richly storied lives. We were a great team.
I embellished his songs and he gave nuance to my poetry. In 1985 were preparing to perform on a concert as a singer/dub-poet duo and a nice lady walked into the rehearsal and everything changed.
Always happy for an audience and anxious for some feedback, we performed our piece and turned to the lady for an opinion. She smiled and told us in soft, sweet voice that "it's really profound, and solemn; and boring!" She reminded us that Lorna Goodison and Dennis Scott were performing on that same show, so there'd be enough good poetry and "deep stuff" on the billing. She suggested that we employ our acting, improvisational and comic skills in the performance instead of bombarding people with more serious stuff. "People want to laugh," she said.
The lady was Honor Ford-Smith, our former acting instructor and an elder in the business whose opinion we valued. So Bello put a pause on his poignant song about world peace and I parked my poem about the real, raw reality and we created a comedic skit. The piece took a light-hearted look at the various definitions of 'culture'. It included a spoof on folk choirs and cliché island songs. It involved an impersonation of Professor Rex Nettleford, and it poked fun at fanatical Afro-centric pretensions. It worked. People roared with laughter and a comedy duo was born.
By gently placing boulders of creative challenge into our dual stream,
Honor Ford-Smith didn’t change our individual or joint course. She simply helped us to make our paths more accessible to more seekers of the water. As comedians, more folks could cross into our river and be enriched by our streams. Our careers flowed further. We touched new banks.
My entertainment career also included acting in various commercial productions, working as a percussionist/backing vocalist for pioneer dub poet Oku Onuora, and writing songs, poems and plays.
In between all of this, I meandered through myriad assignments touching many aligned fields of work. From arts-in-education projects for urban inner city youths in Jamaica to popular theatre training with community based NGOs from all over the Caribbean; including workshop stints in places as diverse as Saskatchewan in Canada, Gottingen in Germany and Bulawayo in Zimbabwe.
In workshop settings, via onstage performances, through motivational talks and in much of my writings – particularly “Blakka’s Box” a weekly column in the Jamaican STAR, I’ve been an instigator and participant in the continuation of a dialogue around the intersection of issues relating to masculinity, violence and art. This is where I’m feeling a deeper rush. I am at a delta now I think.
Maybe I’m doing this program, because I must keep coursing forward. There is an ocean somewhere close by. And that ocean’s empty without me.
Blakka Ellis - MES Candidate
Student # 209005638
September 2007
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I am taking popular education because I am a big fan of education for the people by the people. I feel that we all have experienced oppression at some point in our lives, and that by examining these experiences critically we can deconstruct their roots and build solidarity.
One of the writers, Gustavo Esteva, has started a place in Oaxaca, Mexico, called Universidad de la Tierra. I had the privilege to meet him and listen to his thoughts on education. He is foremost an advocate of apprenticeship and learning through doing. In his talk he quoted someone as saying "Birds fly. Fish swim. People learn." The intentions of the place are awesome, a place to connect folks with mentors in law, medicinal herbs, media and a whole wack of other skills. De facto, however, the organization seems to have become yet another NGO where a lot of good things happen but a dependence on money from grants and foreigners gives the place a slightly different swing. 