The
thing to remember about the long and distinguished
career of the writer/director, documentary filmmaker, choreographer and
theatre
producer, ahdri zhina mandiela is
that before she was any of these, mandiela started out as a poet. And
in
particular the cultural form and style of a poet from Jamaican origin
who early
on sensed that the language of poetry can release the creative spirit
like the
soothing massage of a warm island sea bath. In this sense, mandiela is
in
league with a distinguished group of fellow travelers past and present
including Phillis Wheatley, Maya Angelou, bell hooks and the
choreopoems of
Ntozake Shange; augmented, informed and expanded more recently by the
youth
movements encompassing poetry slam, hip-hop and dub (of which zhina
mandiela
was an early proponent in Toronto).
Although
mandiela's approach to text encompasses the idea
of character development, it does not necessarily rely on it
exclusively to
drive the story line of who knew grannie: a dub aria which centers on
the title
character of grannie (here played with poignant aplomb by Ordena).
The
four cousins who surround their grannie in life and
death come from a variety of backgrounds: tyetye (Joseph Pierre)
is
incarcerated and because of his circumstances is probably given the
most
opportunity to act out the torment and anguish of his situation; vilma (Andrea
Scott) is a political functionary always being interrupted by her
cell phone
and clearly involved in the important affairs of the state; Marcel
Stewart
portraying kris, is a practicing chef who is grateful for the help and
support
grannie showed him throughout his youth as he now proceeds to replicate
her
culinary skills and achieve success in adulthood; likklebit (Miranda
Edwards)
has immigrated to Canada and although now cut off by distance from the
warm
embrace of her grannie, joins with her cousins to remember the special
times of
their childhood days together.
The
performance style of this aria is lively and
emotional while at the same time being straightforward and expository.
The
underlying percussion accompaniment by Amina Alfred
keeps the tempo of the piece without ever retarding or
accelerating it artificially.
Poets
are not all that respected in our society. As the
comedian Fran Lebowitz once observed, "you don't go to that many
cocktail
parties with well-heeled investors and say 'oh, that one over there
made his
money in poetry'." Mandiela's writing is strong and compelling
throughout
and I would suspect that this quality, so profoundly embedded in the
text,
retains its power whether experienced as bedside reading in the privacy
of
one's own room or through the interpretation of actors on the stage.
That's a
tribute to her skill as a writer and not a bad thing at all for the
cause of
poets everywhere.