Students at Green Island High School in Hanover recently won nine awards at the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission National Drama Finals for their performance of Stop gender-based violence. The institution, which has a long history of excellence in the performing arts, is the first school in the Caribbean to conduct that subject at CAPE (Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Exam) level.
Stop gender-based violence was improvised and choreographed by students during a series of gender-based violence (GBV) awareness and performing arts workshops led by Fabian Thomas and his team from Tribe Sankofa during March and April 2022. Directed by veteran Green Island High drama School teacher and drama club coordinator Shaurna Miller, with Thomas as assistant director. In 2016, Miller was awarded the Hanover Rocks Special Award for her outstanding service to the development of culture in the parish.
The workshop series focused on exploring gender-based violence through the performing arts. It was conducted as part of a research project, Representing Gender-Based Violence: Literature, Performance and Activism in the Anglophone Caribbean, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and led by the University of Leicester (UK), in collaboration with the University of the West Indies (UWI).
This project is ongoing and has three main aims: to study how gender-based violence is portrayed in contemporary literature, poetry, drama, spoken word and popular music; to generate new creative work on the topic; and to equip young people to take the lead in arts activism against GBV.
The research project team includes Gabrielle Hosein and Amílcar Sanatan, from UWI, St Augustine campus; Sonjah Stanley Niaah, of UWI, Mona campus; and Lucy Evans and Kelsi Delaney, from the University of Leicester in the UK. The project partners are the ROOTS Foundation and Bocas Lit Fest in Trinidad and Tobago and the Sankofa Tribe in Jamaica.
