TONY HALL in MEMORIAM

By Honor Ford-Smith, performer, organizer and scholar (another version of this text was first published in Trinidad Express on April 29, 2020)

The death of playwright/director Tony Hall leaves a gaping hole in the ground where we walk.

Tony was a mischievous spirit full of warmth and energy. His was the energy of that which is never jaded in spite of all the jabs. Like all brilliant teachers, he had the remarkable ability to awaken and to bring out in others what he had found in himself. He had compassion, the ability to listen and to hear (two different things) and then to act on what he had heard. He combined this with a remarkable humility, with the courage to go fearlessly against the current. He embraced the wisdom of newness. And he did all this so joyously and collaboratively in spite of everything.

I first knew of his work in the years we were called “popular theatre” workers when he was part of a regional network that many of my generation formed. That label, like all labels, was both helpful and restrictive. It was helpful because it opened up a form of work to people who had been excluded from the colonial modes of theatre production. It was restrictive because it did not really allow for the full complexity of the work of folks like Tony who drew on carnival as a way of knowing and making knowledge. This is why his Jouvay theatre method was so critical and so beautifully original. Jouvay did what theatre can best do, transcend and defy all labels and reductions in a search for ever-changing life-altering truths. He understood art as OPENING. Not CLOSING. As immediate as the fingers of the ghost on the skin, the tingling that makes you rise and act. Act on finding ways to see, to prefigure and make in the now. He recognized how folks are always leading from below, making freedom through practice, through action that transcends established patterns of thinking. Jean and Dinah and Miss Miles both demonstrate that transformative, mischievous, joyful defiance that is KAISO translated to the stage.

What saddens me, apart from the personal loss (never ever again in the same way), was the limited means of production available to him to make the most of this line of work in different contexts. Every time this happens I am forced to wonder: can work like his can only cross borders and be intelligible if you have some entry into the authorizing spaces created by empire? It makes me angry to think that it is still that way. In spite of this, I loved that he made fun of academia by saying: “I does have just one paper. And I keep giving it over and over.” AND WHAT A PAPER… I saw him speak about Jouvay several times over the years and each time his insights grew and deepened… living breathing and always growing.

I met him again in Trinidad on a tour with "Fallen Angel and di Devil Concubine". Then again I saw him in action (that I recall) in a workshop here in Toronto, organized by Diane Roberts about 20 years ago giving what he called his “one paper”. Then in October 2019, I heard him again give the more developed version of that one paper at a workshop on Decolonization, Social Movements and Performance in the Caribbean and Canada 1968-1988 that I was privileged to organize with Ronald Cummings and Tony Bogues. Tony blew us all away with the immediacy and brilliant originality of his work. It was literally inspiring in the very sense of taking in the air without which life cannot be sustained. His presentation, as you will see, was immediate and original. It was text and action, call and response, it was a body in motion, and it broke all the staid rules of discourse. He showed the gathering something they hadn’t known before, and that they will all carry with them as a call.

Well Tony, now you have gone and become an ancestor.

Thank you so much for everything you made. Your going is a call. A call to all of us to fill the hole you have left with your goings and above all to continue finding new ways to fill it.

By Rawle Gibbons, Caribbean Yard Campus (an original version of this text was first published in the Guardian on April 29, 2020)

It would be my very first experience of something called ‘drama’, as distinct from theatre, this workshop offered in San Fernando in 1974. He had just returned from Canada. I eagerly travelled from Point Fortin where I was teaching and had just directed ‘Ti-Jean and his Brothers’. For a long time after the due start, I recall being the sole participant. Nonetheless, he started. Call it drama, call it theatre, this art required not only love, but plenty belly. There’ll be fellow travellers, but before the common altar, each one stands alone.

In this theatre journey, Tony Hall was the professional, who, in the Caribbean, lives less by what he earns, than what he learns. Trained in the art, he acted, taught, directed, wrote plays and films, doing what was required, not simply to survive, but to keep the faith alive. Somehow, despite physical weariness, health challenges and the desperation of small places, he managed to sustain a flickering excitement that would alight each project. With great forbearance, he could work with anyone for the sake of theatre, ignoring personal interests, easy-going, relaxed, yet private, strategic. His ability to survive physically and recoup, however, he credited to the support of his wife, Mary, and the rest his family found in Tobago.

As an actor-activist, Tony shifted the focus of theatre in Trinidad from the conventional stage to its socio-political applications called ‘popular theatre’. He understood and interpreted dramatically our indigenous theatre of the streets - Carnival, Ramleela, as well as the movements in history through which we theatricalize resistance and protest. He could work therefore with Minshall in staging mas, performing the emblematic white King Pierrot or taking his play ‘Miss Miles’ to the street. He could direct for the National Carnival Commission the enactment of the Canboulay Riots on the streets of Port of Spain. Just as readily, he could place Naipaul’s short stories on the grounds at UWI or persuade OWTU that the 1937 Butler Riots should be staged preceding the Labour Day march.

Television and film offered opportunities for professional work, shaping the presenter’s persona and expanding his investigation into Caribbean culture. Along with actor Errol Sitahal, Chris Laird, his brother Dennis Hall and Niala Maharaj, the Gayelle team created television informed by local content and style, rather than pre-conceived, foreign formats. In so doing, they opened up our imagination, allowed us to discover how ignorant we were of one another and provided us with deep archives of cultural knowledge.

Always concerned about the state of the art, Tony founded his Playwright's Workshop to fill the need not only for playwrights, but to promote the understanding that writing for the stage was a reciprocating process. This was another point where our journeys converged. The Playwright’s Workshop however, has survived through his personal dedication and determination, despite a frustrating lack of production support, to create a space where generational knowledge could be shared. He persisted because he felt that if he didn’t, then what? His own plays, some very successful, others incomplete, testify to the revising process he advocated for all work, as well as the need to understand and draw on our history as a source of contemporary self-examination. Devoutly managed by Safa Ali, the Playwright’s Workshop is another feature of Tony’s legacy that will endure.

With all its material constraints, working in the Caribbean provides unique opportunities for the creative imagination. Tony’s crystallization of his life’s work he termed the ‘Jouvay Popular Theatre Process’, which he utilized in his teaching whether in classrooms at the University of the West Indies, University of Trinidad and Tobago or the innumerable workshops at institutions across the world. Any encounter with Tony would show his passion for theory, the patient, persistent working through of ideas, which could involve extensive conversations, improvisation and exploration. These became tools of his directorial practice. In this sense, he would claim that many of his productions were ‘co-created, as they should be!' He was unapologetically an actor's director, pushing the boundary with every production, employing, expanding the Jouvay Process theory, which, along with his plays, now represent his original contribution to Caribbean creative praxis.

Sensing the sunset of our own generation of practitioners, our final convergence on this side recognized the need for a regional documentation project, collaboratively undertaken and collectively owned, in which we could all reflect on process. It would include the work of those of us who had crossed earlier, for whom we would find voice. That was just ‘yesterday’. With every passing day, the calls grow more urgent, even as this legacy stands strong. Life, as the joke goes, sometimes imitates art - down to its surprise endings.

RG