From T&T Guardian

The executive of the National Drama Association of T&T will host the gala opening of the 2013 NDATT Theatre Festival on October 22, at the Little Carib Theatre, Woodbrook. Playwright/thespian Tony Hall will be honoured at this year’s festival.

Born Anthony Michael Hall on July 16, 1948, Hall writes and makes plays for street, stage and screen functioning as an actor, director, writer, drama teacher and workshop leader. Hall was born in Port-of-Spain, and attended Naparima College, San Fernando. He gained a Bachelor’s degree in drama and education from the University of Alberta (1969-73), Edmonton, Canada and obtained a diploma in film and advanced television production at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (1978-80).

It is believed regionally that Hall is a pioneer in community television in the Caribbean. With the video production house Banyan Limited, in T&T, he was part of a group, of artists, which created indigenous soap operas, TV dramas and current affairs programmes in the 1970s, 80s and 90s.

At Banyan, Hall presented, with Errol Sitahal, Dennis “Sprangalang” Hall and Niala Maharaj, one of the most successful magazine programmes on TV in the Caribbean, Gayelle (1985-90), citation given at INPUT—International Public Televison Conference.

Gayelle laid the foundation for the first community television station (24 hours of Caribbean programming) in the region, Gayelle The Channel (2004), founded by Christopher Laird and Errol Fabien.

Hall apprenticed in the Caribbean with Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott in his flagship company, Trinidad Theatre Workshop TTW), as an actor and a director (1973-1981). At the TTW, he performed in the world premier productions of Walcott’s The Joker of Seville (1975) and O’ Babylon (1976-81). He also directed, under Walcott’s astute guidance, Jean Genet’s The Maids (1977).

In 1992, Christopher Laird and Hall directed the award winning BBC/TVE/Banyan documentary film, And The Dish Ran Away With The Spoon, produced by Bruce Paddington, and hailed as “an astonishingly searing look at TV” by Starweek Magazine. This film won Best Video Documentary & Best Environmental Film, Images Caraibes (Martinique, 1992) at the Third Caribbean Film & Video Festival and also won first place in the Public Affairs Documentary Category at the 13th annual International Film and Video Competition, Prized Pieces (Ohio, 1993) National Black Programming Consortium, USA.

In the early 1990s Errol Fabien and Hall launched Lordstreet Theatre Company with a prize winning trilogy of J’Ouvert masquerade Carnival bands on the streets of Port-of-Spain: A Band On Drugs (1990), A Band On Violence (1991) and A Band On US (1992). This company promoted original work for street, stage and screen from its very inception and since 2003 has done so primarily through a Playwrights Workshop.

Also in 1990, after years of participatory research into manifestations of popular culture in the Caribbean, Hall realised and presented, at the University of Winchester (King Alfred Campus), UK, Jouvay Process as a distinct and possibly helpful ‘post post-New World’ perspective on drama practice or ‘action’ in relation to living and being.

Hall established Jouvay Popular Theatre Process (JPTP), a drama workshop which involves free improvisation “the extempo impulse” and storytelling inspired by the traditional mas/mask/masquerade characters found in the Trinidad Carnival alongside ‘analogue’ folk and ancient religious characters found throughout the Caribbean and in other cultures worldwide, all as archetypes of human behaviour.

Hall’s play ‘Jean and Dinah . . . Speak Their Minds Publicly’ (1994) is a critically acclaimed work in West Indian theatre. This play has been performed throughout the Caribbean and in North America and the UK. A French version of the play was performed successfully at the UWI Inter-Campus Eighth Annual Foreign Language Theatre Festival in 2007 on the St Augustine Campus.

Hall has led drama courses and theatre workshop sessions at the University of Alberta, at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, at the University of Winchester (King Alfred Campus), at Colgate University, New York, at Indiana State University, at the University of Bradford and at the Carnival Arts Centre, Isle of Wight.

He has functioned as an Artist-in-Residence at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, between 1998 and 2007, where he directed plays and worked with students, professional actors and playwrights, and with young filmmakers at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.

Hall has also functioned as On-Site Academic Director (1999-2007) at Trinity College’s Trinity-in-Trinidad Global Learning Site. At present, functioning as a Lecturer in Global Studies (Festival and Drama), he is exploring with students, “Work & Play” and “Festival Arts as Cultural Performance” at the Trinity-in-Trinidad Global Learning Site.

Last Thursday night, in a message from Costa Rica, Hall told the T&T Guardian: “All the arts are really oxygen for the community, ‘creating breathing space’. If we don’t breathe we die. We need oxygen. Awards, like this one, help provide oxygen for the artist. This award is fully appreciated and even more so because it is from peers at the NDATT. Thanks to everyone.”

PHOTO: Tony Hall in Port-of-Spain on a photoshoot for the play Miss Miles with star Cecilia Salazar in 2011. PHOTO COURTESY LORD STREET THEATRE COMPANY

For more on this story go to:

http://guardian.co.tt/entertainment/2013-10-20/celebrating-genius-tony-hall