THE MAGIC of live theatre is what mainly keeps a bubbly Alison Sealy-Smith on the go; for while she has done the gamut of acting genres in her 30-year career, she wants Barbados – and indeed the world – to hold onto the ancient art of storytelling via theatre.
“Live theatre awakes our senses in a different way,” she told EASY during a break from her busy schedule. Sealy-Smith, the new senior business development officer with the National Cultural Foundation, runs her own local theatre company, Diasporic Productions.
“Live theatre has to do with the suspension of disbelief. When we look at a film, a lot of the time we’re looking for verisimilitude and we judge a film based on how well it makes us see and be there. The power of theatre is that I tell you ‘I am a queen and this chair I’m sitting in is my throne’. Then you say ‘okay’ and suspend your disbelief, and you and I are now in a pact immediately.
“That’s the magic! Because of that, theatre works in a completely different way than film because there’s not the same pact in film,” said the four-time winner of Canada’s Dora Mavor Moore Award, including one for Best Actress in a Leading Role in 2009 in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin In The Sun, the first Broadway drama penned by an African American woman.
“People go into theatres and cry,” she added, recalling the Canada-based Obsidian Theatre Company, of which she is a director and founding member, staging a play about war and featuring a youth accused of killing and burying 17 young women.
“The mother of one of the young women leads him through this forest . . . has to dig up all of these corpses. Now in the movies you’d have special effects but this is live theatre. What can you do?,” she asked, noting one of the shows was presented for students who had basically grown up on Hollywood special effects.
“When he was digging [however], what he pulled out was clothes and he laid them down. I was up in the balcony and watched those students, and when he pulled out the first dress, one girl gave a little scream and covered her eyes. I went ‘wow!’ Suspension of disbelief! Then two little school uniforms came out because he had killed two sisters . . . no crumbling bodies or any nastiness, just empty clothes.
“What we were playing on was the emptiness of them, so you would see that these were clothes that once were full of living human beings. That’s the magic . . . it’s ancient storytelling!,” said Alison, her wide-eyed expression instantly conveying an almost infectious excitement about theatre.
Sadly, she continued, when she left these shores in the late 1970s to complete her degree in Canada – having won a Barbados Scholarship as a student of Queen’s College – it was not possible for her or anyone else to make a living here as an actress. That is still the case, despite the innate passion for live theatre that resides in the bosoms of so many local thespians.
“We need venues,” she pleaded. “We must have the requisite funding and the venues . . . we have existing buildings that need to be refurbished.”
But though she alone may yet be unable to provide a space for theatre practitioners, she wants to share her vision via her new local theatre company, which has already produced a major project: the It So Happen suite, featuring works from the late author and artist Timothy Callender in October 2010.
“The It So Happen suite happened because Ayesha Gibson came to me and said ‘I have this idea’, and when I watched her eyes light up with that same kind of fiery passion that I recognized . . . what [moved] me most was that she had – with no help, no promise of support, no money – spent the last 18 months to two years of her life actually starting to write out the adaptation of Callender’s stories.
“She was going ahead willy-nilly and just figured if she went ahead, somehow something would happen.
I happened, and then it happened,” she recalled.
Such is the kind of legacy which Alison, a mother of two girls age 29 and 21, is seeking to leave on the national landscape, having made her mark in Canada and since being back home from 2009 to attend to her ailing 78-year-old mother.
“Everything that I have and am is because of her, so anytime she needs me I’ll drop everything. But now it’s also not just mum, it’s this bit of a personal crusade, which is, that I have known the joy of being paid for doing what I love and what I think I’m good at, and I want other people, as many as possible, to know that feeling,” she explained in reference to other local actors.
Alison has no problem sharing her vision with others. “I always involve other people in my stuff because I am not interested in the cult of personality . . . because ten years down the road if X decides he doesn’t want to do the venture anymore, the venture goes with him. But if you’re really interested in any kind of institutional legacy, then you have to make sure it’s a team effort.
“For right now I have moved home and I have absolutely no regrets,” added the 52-year-old veteran of the stage, film, production, radio drama and film (voice) animation.
