Artwork by Aadel Chin

Desiree McEachrane

Huh?

The illogical nature of the phrase finally got to me. I dragged my sister down to the University of the West Indies on a Sunday afternoon. No, I did not expect to enjoy the performance from a cushion under a circle of trees, and I certainly never envisioned a setting so intimate that the actors were never more than three feet away from my bare toes.

“Women don’t grow on trees, simply because we are the trees.”

But by the time the cast members got to that line, the audience, filled with both men and women, was already hooked.

Along with poet Akilah Riley, five other women wove a tapestry of monologue, dialogue and poetry to explore womanhood: being, becoming and embracing. The production examined themes of selfhood in early memories; selfhood in primary relationships with other women, like mothers, grandmothers and sisters; physical selfhood — race and beauty; professional and spiritual self, as well as a continuing evolution of womanhood.

“Everything was written by a workshop process,” Tracie Rogers said.

Rogers, who was born in T&T and St Lucia-born Anthea Octave, are both experienced in community and educational theatre.

They fleshed out the concept together and said they wanted to create a piece about women that was collective in expression and structure.

So actress and dancer Joanne Charles, media worker Jada Lee Condappa and poets Ivory Hayes and Riley added their experiences and expertise to the mix.

Similar stories

“What was so fascinating was that while we all had individual experiences, we all had similar stories,” Rogers said.

Each member had monologues that shared from both collective and personal experience; for example, Charles’ very West Indian dilemma of being caught between two mothers. Condappa and Rogers each gave hilarious descriptions of the older sister-younger sister power struggle. Hayes described being an only child to a mother who would hold down any job that helped her raise her. And Octave’s piece gave insight into discipline from a West Indian mother.

While the group was putting together this project, 22-year-old artist Michelle Isava was planning to exhibit her artwork on campus — plaster of Paris casts of the female figure tied to trees as a comment on the cultural treatment of women as property, as well as the stereotypical image of women as only nurturers.

“In my previous exhibition, called The Temple of Local Sexuality the casts were labelled with sexual innuendoes common to Trinidad,” Isava explained. “Each cast is a different part of the female form, never a whole body, so they were called Ah Mash She Up, which is a conquering phrase that portrays women as property.”

Isava and the cast of Women Don’t Grow On Trees combined their projects, to create a theatre experience that united visual, dance and theatre arts in one production.

The performance received artistic direction from Louis Mc Williams, who also directed the musical Oliver, staged at Queen’s Hall earlier this year by the UWI Festival Arts Chorale and the Faculty of Humanities and Education.

McWilliams, who also accompanied the performance on African drum, was the only man involved, and indeed even mentioned throughout the entire performance.

“It was a deliberate choice we made, not to talk about our relationships with men,” Rogers said. “Not because they aren’t important, because they are and we love them. We were all of the opinion that being female affects every other role that we have and the only way that we can deal with certain things about us as women is in relation to how we deal with other women.”

A male perspective

The group opened up the floor after their performance and let the audience share about how the piece impacted upon them. Ironically, it was a man who made one of the more memorable comments about the performance.

“I talked to a guy after the Saturday show. He said that he doesn’t understand women any better, but he’s beginning to see that men and women are coming from completely different places, like we should be a whole other species,” Condappa said, smiling.

The Centre of the Creative and Festival Arts and the Faculty of Humanities and Education, in the form of student representative Michelina Charles, gave invaluable assistance in making the show possible, Rogers said.

The group hopes to put together a repeat performance sometime in the future, but after pulling everything together in just three weeks, “we need some time to catch our breath first,” Rogers laughed.

Why put on a show about the experiences of women in the first place? According to Rogers, just telling a story gives it value, because it helps both performer and audience understand more about themselves.

“We think that it’s important that everyone — men and women — to understand. We did it to understand our own experiences and how they’ve shaped us, even before sharing that with anybody else,” Rogers explained.

“For women, we wanted them to reflect, and to understand the value of their own process to become a woman. For the men, we wanted them to understand the complexity of women, that we’re not so simple that you can pick any one of us off a tree.”

After all, we are the trees, right?