The Guyanese performers finally had their big night at Carifesta VIII when their main production “Guyana Ting-A-Merry” went on stage at Ons Erf (Our Yard) in Paramaribo. They had already performed out of town and at last took centre stage in the city towards the end of the week. But it was not yet over for them, since they were still to spend the last day travelling to Nickerie for a “District Tour” performance.

The house was packed and the show started late. There were great expectations from an audience that included a very large contingent of Guyanese living in Suriname and others who were visiting, all happy to applaud generously at every reasonable item. The cast must have felt quite at home, but just to make sure they did, the hospitable hosts engineered a black-out. Some 15 minutes into the show, the theatre was plunged into darkness by a power outage. The drummers were, of course, unfazed, and kept up the rhythms for the full 30 minutes or so before electricity returned.

The production itself has a curious title, prompting enquiries as to what it meant. “Ting-A-Merry” has a certain onomatapoeic ring suggesting a light, entertaining jig of little substance. Programme coordinator Raymond Cummings glossed it as a Guyanese idiom used to call something for which no specific name can be found. If that is the case, the Guyanese Carifesta production was appropriately titled. It was entertaining and indeed merry. The performers threw themselves into the act with energy, enjoyment and Joi de vive. The female dancers were delightful and up to the task while their male counterparts lacked technique and competence.

The singers were mixed but left one thinking that surely Guyana could have found a more melodious trio with ease. The musicians were competent and the drummers so enthusiastic that nothing could get them to keep quiet even when it was necessary.

Yes, the performance was entertaining, full of life and sometimes colour. But the production as designed and put together is shallow and generally without meaning. The traditions it claims to showcase were mostly watered down with interpretations that lack depth and do not give any comprehensive exhibition of Guyana’s cultural tenor or any clear picture of what its traditions are like. It is best described as “piecy-piecy”, devoid of thematic wholeness and artistic concept. Audiences unfamiliar with Guyana would not have gone away with a memorable picture of most of the cultural elements it attempted to depict.

The performance opened with an effective tableau representing the Guyana coat of arms, a fairly good idea that had visual effect, but what accompanied it was choreographically weak. There was greater strength in the dance that followed. That one was a reasonable attempt to create a dance around the image of the arrow, the main symbol in the Guyana flag danced to the song “Arrowhead” composed and sung by Courtney Noel. The girls managed it well, as they did in most of the other choreographies, earning applause from the crowd for their confident performance even at times when the concept was weak. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for the male dancers. Guyana Boom” danced by four of them was nothing less than a disaster. Its place in the already bitty, itemized programme was dubious and its meaning unfathomable.

One of the difficulties with the way this production tried to exhibit Guyanese culture is that too often it was done with words, either spoken or through the words of a song. The thing about the stage, however, is that ideas need to be dramatized for an audience to see and hear. This did not happen. “Ting-A-Merry” depended on the words of songs to do much of the work, either unaccompanied by movement or mine or accompanied by something that lacked strength and effectiveness. It did not help that some of the words were changed, which made the performance more generalized and diffused, thus failing to present its subject specifically.

This was the case in the presentations of chutney and phagwah. Rajesh Dubraj sang well enough, but the worlds were interfered with. What was more, nothing was done to assist him in showcasing the chutney tradition. While there was a dance in colourful costume choreographed by Rewattie Datt, it had nothing to dramatize the easily dramatizeable things about phagwah.

One place where the words worked was in “Guyana Gaff” written by Jennifer Davis and Raymond Cummings. It used a fair amount of witty dialogue to tell about Guyana and it came off because of the very intelligent dramatization by Deon Abrams and Dorian Obermuller.

Some other items could speak for themselves, such as the masquerade, the tassa, the African drumming and the Mari Mari. The masquerade flouncers were good, particularly Linda Griffith and the stiltsman Trevor Blackette. The fife player Jerome Cumberbatch carried the tunes but the most amazing thing about this was the performance of the drummers who failed completely to play the correct masquerade rhythm. The dancers flounced to the fife, not the drums. Dubray was outstanding on the tassa drum and both drummers and dancers were on top of the African rhythms.

However, the best item in the programme for its completeness and its uncomplicated presentation of its subject was the Mari Mari song and dance was simple, but well costumed disciplined and effective. Its only flaw came from elsewhere. It was a mistake to have them accompanied by a full team of seven drummers who drowned out the sound of the voices in rather insensitive fashion. That piece was a reminder that it is better to show the performance traditions without unnecessary interference as happened in places where it seemed they were trying to show something about the Caribbean in general rather than specific Guyanese phenomena.

“Guyana Ting-A-Merry” came over, therefore, as a programme of bits and pieces, a few really good and too many indifferent. A production like this needs some degree of an overarching dramatic unity and conceptual depth. The printed programme had notes describing some of the traditions being shown, but more of that must, instead, be effectively dramatized on stage rather than on page. While it is true that Carifesta VIII hardly had any outstanding theatre, this merry “ting” did not achieve much for Guyana.