Douen Islands

Project: Douen Islands
Client: Bocas Lit Festitval
Location: Woodbrook, POS
Year: 2014; 2016
Category: Performance

DOUEN ISLANDS: IN FOREST & WILD SKIES (Part 1)

The story goes, "Watch your child, douen go get dem."

Douen: A Trinidad folklore character. The unbaptised souls of children that live in the forest. Neither male nor female, they feed off cultivated gardens and have a peculiar liking for the watercrab. Large straw hats, perched on faceless heads, cover long plaited hair. They entice children under a full moon. Their feet are backwards (Côté ci Côté la, 2012). 

As a child, this I believe is how my spine was born. Alfred Codallo's painting, Folklore (1958) at The National Museum and Art Gallery in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, was an initiation. I believe all Trinidadians go through it. The absolute fear and discomfort that is born from Douens is as real as any phobia, often buried in our childhood memories.

Douen Islands: In Forest & Wild Skies (April 2014) was a special collaboration with journalist/poet, Andre Bagoo, at Alice Yard based on his poetry e-book called, Douen Islands: Tomorrow Please God (free download here).  

Douen Islands is a devious remixing of traditional Douen culture. (a) Remove the straw hats. (b) Invite them inside. (c) Straighten their feet. (d) All of the above. This is an open collaboration to incite anxiety, provoke beauty.

...a journey, unearthing what is lost - the furtive child foraging through darkened forest; tricked by moonlight into a vacant past; vanishing, like love and blood, into wild skies. A slippery stream flowing out of this post-Independence country, trek into heat, memory, nightmare, dream. Take back the steps we never took. Seek to find.

Andre and I were determined to put a contemporary spin on Douens and build it out as a collaboration with other highly creative individuals. The event at Alice Yard saw the likes of emerging writers like Shivanee Ramlochan and Commonwealth Short Story Award winner, Sharon Millar join forces with contemporary artist Rodell Warner and musician Sharda Patasar, to re-imagine and stir imaginations around this folktale.    

For me, it's the space that intrigues most. Alice Yard is no exception.

This was once the house of Sean Leonard’s great-grandmother. Four generations of children played and imagined in this yard, and now we continue this tradition. Alice Yard is a space for creative experiment, collaboration, and improvisation.

Since 2008, Alice Yard has run a residency programme hosting artists, curators, and other creative practitioners.

Designing the yard was a blissful rush. Andre wanted it red, so we made it red. He wanted leaves, we toted bag after bag, serendipitously raked and bagged by CEPEP at the nearby Queen's Park Savannah. When we wanted car tyres, they showed up under a small tree in a Belmont parking lot on Jerningham Ave. We wanted to broadcast live tweets from Jamaica — loud and clear outside the bathroom stall. Help with choreography, Dave Williams came strolling through the front gates. Will it — at Alice Yard it will. Editor and collaborator, Nicholas Laughlin puts it well:

Thinking about last night’s Douen Islands event -- and all the people who made it possible by sharing time, expertise, equipment, and labour -- I was struck again by the generosity of our network and its immeasurable value...

...TT is a small and mercenary society where -- unlike some other Caribbean territories -- official culture institutions are weak, there is no tradition of private philanthropy, and no wealthy expat/tourist population to “support the arts.” Our agenda and our reward are to make room in our context for imagination and generosity, and serious work that at the same time is also serious play.

The motive is to keep ourselves challenged and fascinated, and in conversation with people who energise us. It’s as selfish and as selfless as that. As simple and as complicated as that.


. . .

 

DOUEN ISLANDS: KISKADEE (Part 2)

When I play the piano — as opposed to when I am listening to piano music — I don't hear my mistakes. My mind is too busy imagining an idealized performance to hear what is actually emanating from the instrument. In this sense, the performative aspects of playing the piano inhibit my ability to hear.

—Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read (2014)

Douen Islands is a performance. As is the act of reading. It takes place at Alice yard, the backyard space of the house at 80 Roberts Street, Woodbrook, Port of Spain. 

This was once the house of Sean Leonard’s great-grandmother. Four generations of children played and imagined in this yard, and now we continue this tradition. Alice Yard is a space for creative experiment, collaboration, and improvisation.

This year's installation of Douen Islands: Kiskadee was not a show. Like Mendelsund — rather an idealised performance full of mistakes — imagination at play. Bocas, just a deadline.

Enter Douen Island: Kiskadee — a yard now reading space. “Alice Yard an aviary:” as poet bird caller Vahni Capildeo types, and utters in tongues and chirps, on her book cover/billboard. Her verses, punctuated with lush cinemagraphs taken from the Orinoco Delta by contemporary artist Luis Vasquez La Roche; a kiskadee on a wire. A moving picture book.

Enter Alice Yard—a reading space now bird cage now flutter of pages. Where words become lines become movement of soca/contemporary dancer Candace Thompson, who makes her debut in Alice Yard, live streamed from a dance studio in Brooklyn, NY projected onto suspended strips of white cloth layered—dancing in the wind. This makes the space soft, calm and alive. In the way, are 3 cages that float and subtly sway. Within are books, chalk and charcoal; a pair of slippers in case; a mirror to reflect; and manuscripts to edit. On entering, pages are curtains and reading is simply a performance.

Ahead is the Annex now Orinoco Delta. It drifts behind a steel cage, in silence with mangrove as a horizon. The yard now a boat, a raft adrift. Comes across a douen kiskadee, a sporadic animation by creative Kwasi Shade. Land is reached and Luis transports us back to Vahni who is loud, bold, masked, and omnivorous—drowned out by the sun drenched silence of the floating Delta, and by literary kiskadees perched on the balcony of a twitter branch, outside—pruned by the good folk of Northeleven and malnourished by Rodell 'turnt_urn' Warner. 

Saturday night, and it's kiskadee night at the yard:

Andre Bagoo
Elisha Bartels (bird-lady)
Peter Christopher
Breanne McIvor
Sharon Millar
Shivanee Ramlochan

A splendid line of poets/writers — The Kiskadees — a wild rumpus in a chatter of call and response. Kis ka dees calling kiskadees calling kis kadees . . . a beautiful flautist named Martina Chow to accompany the chorus.

It's here in Alice Yard, where from my knowledge, everything was done for the first time, browser-based and streamed from the internet: looping videos on Youtube, live streaming with USTREAM and Twitter Ticker, and tracks from Soundcloud. This marks a new art direction for myself personally as a designer: creative coding (Processing, P5, HTML 5, CSS, Javascript) which treats the web platform as a serious toolkit for designing and creating digital and interactive work, from open-source software to online collaborations. A medium for Trinidad to unlock. 

Douen Islands: Kiskadee was not a show. It was an idealized performance full of mistakes and firsts. A first draft with a yellow feathered chest and gyrations. A stab at global theatre as Marshall McLuhan might call it, in cahoots with Vahni Capildeo. Playtime with Tati, featuring a Trinidadian cast and a passerine bird. Full of imagination and hopeful duende.

Special thanks: Leila Capildeo, Performance Philosophy, Ali's Pet Store, Jimmy Abouds, Andre Zachery, Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, Sharda & Prashant Patasar, Sean Leonard, Gabriel, G, Nicholas Laughlin, Josh Lu, Gerry Anthony, Samantha, Mathew, Sean, and Johann (Northeleven).

Douen IslandsKriston ChenAlice Yard, Andre BagooComment