PANTOPIA, now playing on a big stage at Phase II Pan Groove’s panyard theatre over last and this weekend, is a must-see-should-be-a-bound-to-see musical play about the challenges of personal and institutional development in pan. It is open air theatre where the roof is the open skies above. The entertainment cost $300 a pop.
PANTOPIA, now playing on a big stage at Phase II Pan Groove’s panyard theatre over last and this weekend, is a must-see-should-be-a-bound-to-see musical play about the challenges of personal and institutional development in pan. It is open air theatre where the roof is the open skies above. The entertainment cost $300 a pop.
The play is acted out by a cast of 11 players, each endowed with a depth of well-horned performing arts skills that includes a generous versatility for playing pan music! Music is supplied by this cast, as well as from members of The National Steel Symphony Steel Orchestra.
This musical’s storyline pivots on the psychological trauma of a singular engagement by the playwright’s muse, Ray Holman – teacher, composer, arranger- as he strove to overcome a popularly held cultural resistance to his view of what is authentic change and transformation in the steel instrument’s music. While the popular culture wants music for annual Carnival Panorama competition from Solo (Ray Holman) who the players embrace magnanimously, Solo who gets along, first by embracing their desire for compositions that win competition, eventually urges the export of live music as a more rewarding view of success. This sets up an irreconcilable contention. Solo struts out of the pan-yard, is forced to abort his commitment to authentic change, and ends up on the rubbish heap of society, lamenting his and pans’ future.
Against that conflict between composer and the orchestra’s players Pantopia’s narrative highlights a larger social struggle for change that historically pitted young urban African Trinagoians in a struggle for change against the government of the day. That was the Black Power Revolution of 1970 accompanied with ceaseless cries for Power to the People. With energies consumed by demands for social and political change the narrative notes that pan music was less the flavour of the times. Yet the logic of the drive for African and Indians to unite was a culmination that led to a dramatic response from Indo Trinidad with its tassa drumming and Ram Leela religious celebration and brought a significant cross- cultural fertilisation of commitment that boosted optimism and rebooted the struggle for social change. Actors Chandra and Jagroop emerge in the play to mark that development.
Pride of place (in my view) goes to Syntyche Bishop as Bazo. She is the crazed muse who encourages and inspires Solo’s musical inventiveness. She is a bright-eyed-up-in-yuh-face zany character, encouraging audience participation, foretelling the “good news” in the struggle between Solo and his players over the future of pan music. Like Solo, Bazo’s own creative seer-woman impulses challenge the popular pan music culture. The pan Philistines reject her “good news”. On the stage of life both characters end up on the rubbish heap of society, and Bazo re-enters the stage with thrown away tin pans tied to her skirt’s hem, as she totes a bag of detritus over her shoulder, and heads to join Solo, a fellow castaway. Though made mad by the struggles for change, this returning-outcast, to use Mighty Sparrow’s unforgiving description of the pan player, (Pass yuh outcast) Bazo is determined to regain her sanity once more. Other actors in the play are Delron Ellies, as Captain; Kimani McPhie as Solo; Alana Ash, and Christopher Best as Jagroop and High Noon; and Jendai Toussaint as Chandra.
Ash epitomises the popular cultural resistance to any promise that departs from the fruits of the familiar. She masters speech that is a curt cutting-down-back-chatting witticism that provokes rage, deriles opponents and defies Solo’s and Bazo’s opposing views, much to the gleeful guffaws of her audience. Captain of the pan side is given a capacity for more articulated resistance to Solo’s wish to change from the glory of Panorama competitions.
We leave the play highly entertained, but challenged to accept that change can be difficult, can be resisted by the popular culture it is designed for, and above all, can be small, unconsummated and ephemeral. There is no easy path to change and there can be no change without the choreography of honest engagement between leader and led. Gibbon’s creative genius is to unlock Ray Holman’s life of engagement with pan players to show how much the trauma of disappoint with the popular culture can, in the eyes of protagonists, throw change-agents on the rubbish heap of society. He could be writing about Peter Minshall, Lloyd Best and Tapia, Earl Rodney, Bertie Marshall, Keith Smith or even Derek Walcott. Pantopia is an enigmatic “pantrait” of Trinidad and Tobago that, as hard-nosed insight, supersedes the portraits presented by Sniper (“Portrait of Trinidad”) and Valentino (“Trinidad is a Paradise”). The musical is as much about Ray Holman, as it is about Rawle Gibbons. Theatergoers will do well to discover that.
