Abstract
This paper considers the accomplishments and of Jamaican-born actor/teacher practitioner Sydney Hibbert (died 1990) who spent most of his professional life in the United States. It uses the Caribbean “sound of many cultures” he talks about to illuminate his work. In the early 1960’s Hibbert trained at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and the Guildhall School of Music, afterwards receiving two British Council Drama Awards and an Arts Festival citation. Attracted to the US by the civil rights movement, Hibbert became Head of the Harlem School for the Arts Drama Workshop, returning to the Caribbean to lead “Theatre 77, the precursor of Jamaica’s (1966 to 2005) Barn Theatre. Back in the U.S. Hibbert worked in New York and Los Angeles, garnering Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle awards, teaching at the Harlem School, leading the Rutgers/Livingston campus dram program, teaching at the North Carolina School for the Arts. In the mid-1970’s Hibbert’s hopes for what a Caribbean might accomplish in the states began slipping. In performance, later a 1986 book, Anansi and Munti: A Caribbean Soul in Exile, he writes that “all men are not created equal” in the U.S. What were Hibbert’s accomplishments in his performance work and writing? He was an artist who embraced his Jamaican heritage, reflecting the color and imagery, the sound of that country in whatever he did. *Taken from the “Anansi and Munti: A Caribbean Soul in Exile” by Sidney Hibbert
Presenters
Thomas ArthurFaculty Emeritus, School of Theatre and Dance, Theatre, James Madison University, Virginia, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Education and Learning Worlds of Differences
KEYWORDS
Drama, Cross-Cultural Communication, Cultural Translation, Race
