big River 3 International Artists' Workshop

Above: Ingrid Mwangi (Kenya/Germany) Mohammed
Muwakil (Trinidad), LaVaughn Belle (Us Virgin Islands)
Gabrielle Hosein (Trinidad)
Below: Corey Wallace (Trinidad), Marlon Griffith (Trinidad), Hamlet Cordovi (Cuba), Naima Thompson (Trinidad), John Beadle (The Bahamas), Dave Williams (Trinidad), Akuzuru (Trinidad- *in white), Mauricio Ianes (Brazil), Yingmei Duan (China/Germany), Smitha Cariappa (India)

Committee/Group: Akuzuru, Dave Williams, Sean Leonard
Workshop Coordinator: Jaime Lee Loy
Director CCA: Charlotte Elias


CLICK HERE FOR MORE IMAGES OF THE WORKSHOP


Statements from artists
Short bios of the artists
Links

The big River 3 International Artists’ Workshop occurred between the 23rd of February and the 10th March, which closed with The Final Show at The Little Carib Theatre on Sunday the 12th March 2006. Performances ranged from dance, music, and oral poetry to the use of the body as an installation or a moving piece. As part of CCA’s Education programme a public discussion was hosted at The Little Carib Theatre on Friday the 10th March. Invited speakers included Wendell Manwarren (3 Canal- local rhapso group ), Dave Williams (choregrapher and dancer), Chris Cozier (artist and writer), and La Vaughn Belle (participating artist on the workshop from St Croix). There was also a participating audience which included representatives from various schools and youth members from the YMCA.

Fourteen artists, Seven local and seven International) participated in the Workshop. Following the heartbeat of Carnival it focused mainly on the performing arts. Local participants included Naima Thompson, Marlon Griffith, Corey Wallace, Gabrielle Hosein, Mohammed Muwakil, Akuzuru and Dave Williams. International participants included Ingrid Mwangi Kenya/Germany, Smitha Cariappa (India), Yingmei Duan (China/ Germany), Mauricio Ianes (Brazil), Hamlet Cordovi (Cuba), LaVaughn Belle (The Us Virgin Islands), and John Beadle (The Bahamas).

The big River workshops had previously been held in Grand Riviere, North Trinidad. big River 3 broke this mold. For the first time the workshop entered the urban arena, with Carnival 2006 forming the creative platform for participants. For the first week of the workshop artists were totally immersed in Carnival, which provided the workshop’s creative catalyst. All artists participated in several events over the Carnival weekend, and International artists performed with Peter Minshall’s Sacred Heart Mas presentation. On Ash Wednesday morning, the artists were transported to the seclusion of the forests of Aripo to The Aripo Cottage, where they created and collaborated work, guided by the core theme ‘ACCESS DENIED’.

The theme of the Workshop questioned the idealism of integration in the Caribbean in a time of territory marking and boundary staking, where missions of cultural diversity are placed high on the agenda. ‘You’re either in or you’re out,’ bringing to light the question, “Are our Caribbean, and even our individual identities being forged by exclusionism hidden under the façade of ‘diversity’ rather than the idealism of integration?

The theme ACCESS DENIED evolved through a sense of the existence of trends and modes of exclusion and inclusion, at many levels and in many spheres, which are integral to configuring the course of development in our and other societies. In its cursory reading, Carnival presents a picture of multiple inclusion and kindred spiritedness. The discussion however asks the question whether there are alternative conversations, mechanisms and agendas that actually feed, and feed on the festival, and whether these are in fact a reflection of the active dynamic and systems that form and configure our larger society. What is the connection of this dynamic to the determination of value, worth, interpretation and aspiration?

Artists used the quiet space of the Aripo Heights at the Aripo Cottage to let their artistic processes feed off the energy from their experiences with Mas in Port of Spain.


Artists Bio's

Gabrielle Hosein is a poet, activist, feminist and student. She is passionate about the earth, words and justice. Her research focuses on participation and governance, and she teaches at UWI St Augustine. She hopes to continue creating ways of 'story letting' through creative experiments that express and bridge different spheres of life.

Corey Wallace a.k.a Coreysan is a self-taught musician who has been performing, composing, arranging, and recording for the past 17years. He is also a Tai Chi instructor and Craftsman. From underground bands to well known Trinidadian artistes and bands, his present project is a direct amalgamation of the inspiration gathered from his multicultural musical adventures.

Dave Williams started dancing in 1986 with the Noble Douglas Dance Company. In 1996 he founded the performance group ‘Standing Room Only’. In 2003/2004 he was the head of the dance department of the Oakland School for the Arts in California. He is a dancer, choreographer, and teacher.

Mohammed Muwakil is a 22 year old Trinidadian poet who tries to embody in his work ‘what it really feels like to be a citizen of the 3rd world country at the feet of the USA, in a post-colonial society divided and stratified by race and creed.’ - ‘ I want to re-create in word the fight that is my life, the fire that is my soul. My struggle to be truly free.’

Ingrid Mwangi lives and works with her partner Robert Hutter in Germany and Kenya as an artist collective working with new media, producing videos, installations, photo-based works and performances. Using their bodies and the visual reflections of these, their works present and discuss concepts of identity; the relationship of the individual to his/ her environment and the possibility to shape and transform society. – “I am desperate for change”

John Beadle, the son of a Jamaican man and a Bahamian woman was born in the Bahamas. He is a painter who incorporates the elements of sculptural work and printmaking into his painting. He is also a designer and a builder in the Junkanoo Festival in the Bahamas.

Yingmei Duan was born in China. She has pursued art since 1991. She moved to Germany in 1999 in order to develop her art. She was more involved with painting until the year 2000. Since then she has been drawn to performance and performance installation. www.yingmei_art.com

Mauricio Ianes is a Brazilian artist who at 32 currently lives and works in Sao Paulo. His work embraces different media such as installation, performance, drawing, video and photography, and deals with language and communication issues and the relation established between artist and audience.

Naima Thompson is a teacher at the International School of Port of Spain where she teaches communication Art – related courses. She is the founder and the director for the Necessary Arts school which takes pride in integrating at-risk youth with mainstream participants to a Workshop in the Arts in a full scale production to showcase talent. Naima has a BA in Communication Arts and a MA in Education and contributes to the empowerment of people through the arts.

Smitha Cariappa is an artist based in Bangalore, South India. Her initial background is in painting with a BFA and an MFA degree. Through experimentation with various materials and mediums by ‘inhabiting space within space’ and the ‘marriage of material with space’ moved into installation. Currently, the works are in the form of Performance Art, inviting the active participation of the spectator/audience to complete the artwork.

Marlon Griffith’s work draws from the traditions of Carnival working with materials that would normally be used in the construction of costumes, to find new and interesting ways of making work outside of the Carnival construct to project his thoughts and ideas. He is also a illustrator, printmaker and masman. He uses his work as a catalyst to promote culture and education.

LaVaughn Belle’s work has evolved from figurative and symbolic explorations in painting to a variety of modes that include video, performance, installation and public intervention projects. The emphasis of the work, however, does not lie in the medium, but in creating a dialogic space to explore the relationship between art and daily life. Currently she is most interested in the in- between spaces where the lines between the public and the private, the individual and the social are blurred.

Hamlet Cordovi attends El Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) in Havana, Cuba. His work tends to be engaged with ideological problems surrounding different bureaucratic systems and its effect on the human psyche. His work ranges from drawings, paintings, video animation and performance with the intention to include the iconography of political propaganda in a re-interpretation using humour and satire.

Akuzuru is an interdisciplinary artist who embraces installation and performance and continually experiments with textiles as sculpturing media. Her vision embraces space as the essential and most important raw material in the creative process. Her work has an overall filmic rendition with architectonics sewn into her performance pieces and presentations. The immediate surrounding environment forms part of the concerns with space and its multi-sociological effects on the human phenomenon.

Statements and pictures to be posted soon

Sponsors:
The Commonwealth Foundation, The Prince Claus Fund (Holland), The Ministry of Community Development, Culure and Gender Affairs, The United States Embassy, RBTT, Guardian Life of the Caribbean Ltd., Scotiabank Trinidad and Tobago Ltd, Maraj Gold Ltd., Caribbean Chemicals and Agencies Ltd.

Supporters:
The High Commission of India, The ICCR. The Mahatma Ghandi Institute, Scrip-J Printers, Southern Wholesale Stores Ltd., Century Eslon Ltd, Sissons Paints Trinidad Ltd, John Dickinson & Co. WI Ltd, Tourism Development Company, Media 21, The Little Carib Theatre, Banyan Productions Limited, and The Aripo Cottage.