Event Screening (virtual)
Date Saturday 27th March
Time 6PM (Guyana)
Link https://www.bocaslitfest.com/wilson-harris-at-100/
You are warmly invited to tune in for the inaugural screening of The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination, an excerpt from a dramatic work in progress, directed by Nicholas Singh. This excerpt has been produced by Moray House Trust with support from the Bocas Literary Festival. It is to be screened as part of their celebration of the 100th anniversary of Wilson Harris’ birthday: see their Wilson Harris at 100 webpage.
The play compares two approaches to social change in the Caribbean: Wilson Harris’s dreamworld of the creative imagination and Walter Rodney’s more grounded approach. This excerpt explores the radical imagining championed by Wilson Harris and shows where this approach might lead.The play draws on elements of Brechtian Theatre, Theatre of the Oppressed, and Forum Theatre to shape a socially aware theatrical performance enveloping actors, writer, performance space and audience. This “socially aware” dramatic style allows performers and audience to pivot between the ideologies of Wilson Harris and Walter Rodney, historicism and poeticism: it highlights the complexities of daily life and our roles as individuals within the societal margins we inhabit.
In this excerpt, Wilson Harris uses the example of Antigone, (a play by Sophocles) as an analogy of social blindness between opposing parties, that is, State and individual, law and morals. This example, or analogy rather, seeks to explain how, as members of society, our opposed views are centered on a figurative blindness- a failure to see or understand the perspective of reality before us, while balancing between the extremities of who is right and what is wrong. Harris focuses on the use of the creative imagination to combat this blindness, through inspection of the abyss within us, and the discovery of new particularities that may offer us a new discourse in social change.