Makeda Thomas invited at the U.W.I.
Invited by Rawle Gibbons and Marvin George, on Friday, 31 October 2014, I spoke at The Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) at the University of the West Indies in St. Augustine. Trinidad. The audience was a diverse class of undergraduate students in "Critical Readings in Caribbean Arts and Culture":
"Critical Readings in Caribbean Arts and Culture" at the U.W.I
The course brings together students from all disciplines at the degree level (ie. Carnival Studies, Dance, Music, Theatre Arts and Visual Arts), and introduces them to the intellectual heritage of the region. The course assumes firstly that this knowledge is critical to our very being (the likes of James, Nettleford, Naipaul, Walcott, Guillen, Lam, Lamming, Benitez-Rojo, Cesaire, Harris etc. are studied) and that as an area of knowledge our students (ie Caribbean students) are not usually as immersed/exposed to these persons/ideas as their counterparts at international universities. To address this, the course is based on a series of guest discussions from important Caribbean artists, cultural workers/researchers/academics/activists, who offer a talk about their work in relation to the four sub-themes that we cover over the 2 semesters. Our students - in their interdisciplinary groups - then grapple with these ideas, along with the readings, for the formation of their own understandings of the themes; subsequent to which they offer their own thoughts firstly through multi-disciplinary presentations, and seminars, then journals and essays.” -Marvin George
I welcomed the opportunity to speak about my newest work, “Speech Sounds”, of older works like “Fresh Water" and "A Sense of Place" and of how I engage multiple artistic disciplines in multiple geographic and cultural spaces.
I spoke about the role of teaching in my practice, of the Dance & Performance Institute, and of being in a space where my work as artist, educator, and curator has entered more reflective synergy - to where each is constituting the other as they’re being constituted.
The creative, trans-disciplinary, and the artistically vibrant university community was the perfect context in which to ask important questions about contemporary art-making processes in the Caribbean.
