Barbados Landship Association’s Lord High Admiral Vernon Watson accepting the Lifetime Achievement Award from Culture Minister, Stephen Lashley.
Local theatrical stalwarts honoured
Sun, 05/22/2016 - 12:00am
By:
Marsha Gittens
The spotlight shone brightly on three of Barbados’ theatrical stalwarts recently when they were presented Lifetime Achievement Awards during the inaugural Baobab International Theatre Festival.
Chairman of the Baobab Festival Committee, Winston Farrell explained that the Festival aims to promote community building and further develop theatre arts locally.
“This is a Festival hopefully that we can allow our local practitioners to network with international and other world-class performers. That we can create a stage here in Barbados that can host theatre from around the world so that we become like a Mecca not just for cricket but for theatre.”
“We are confident that over the next couple of years we can attract interesting performers, interesting troops of theatre practitioners here to Barbados to deliver. Our aim is to continue to build up the local theatre audience. We also hope that we can attract visitors to the island around this time of the year outside of the tourist season and we figure that we can create enough activity as it relates to theatre that people would want to come here.”
Farrell also told the gathering at the Launch and Awards Evening held in Queen’s Park that the Festival is intended to be a platform where the respective graduates of the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus and the Barbados Community College’s theatre arts programmes can develop and further hone their craft.
During the Awards Evening, Lifetime Achievement Awards were given to Anthony Hinkson, Andrea Gollop-Greenidge and The Barbados Landship Association. A special Appreciation Award was presented to the visiting group from New York, NIA Theatrical Productions.
The Baobab International Theatre Festival commenced on May 20th and will conclude on May 27th. The Festival’s activities include: a workshop for theatre arts students, a workshop for teachers of drama/theatre and the Baobab Guy Goring Memorial Lecture. There will also be a performance of the play, ‘House of Landship Revisited’.