Paula Lindo – Our histories, stories, present, future.

As the Applied Creative Arts program Arts-in-Action (AiA) celebrates its 22nd year of existence, it is honouring its founders and alumni during its annual summer programs. This year, the Discovery Camp, for children aged five to 13 years, honours Samantha Pierre, who was known for her portrayal of the character Ma Story. 

This year’s theme is ‘Ole Story Time: A Tribute to Ma Story’. During the camp period, campers work with their tutors towards a dramatic presentation, which they showcase to their family and friends on the last day.

AiA Creative Development Officer Patrice Briggs said Pierre, who died in 2010, is fondly remembered by all who knew her. “Sam was a great actress, a great facilitator, and talking and being a people person is something she definitely was. Everybody would know about Sam because of how she was able to engage with people and share with them based on where they were at. She would take their stories and use parts of them to create stories to share back to others and with the children.”
Briggs said Pierre traditionally opened her performances with a signature song “Come gather round children, we’re telling stories this evening.” Pierre used songs, games and folklore characters such as Anansi, Mama D’leau and Papa Bois to create stories and deliver messages “whether it’s about learning values and traditions, things like respect, all those different life skills and themes that we grew up with long time ago and that are being forgotten in our society today. Storytelling was in Sam’s blood, she was a born storyteller.”
Pierre got her start in the Cayman Islands where she did her first storytelling performance at the Gimistory Storytelling Festival and continued on to perform at storytelling festivals in the Caribbean, North America and the UK. She also performed in character as Ma Story in Talk Tent with Paul Keens-Douglas for many years.
Briggs said the tribute to Pierre will be embedded within the activities the children will participate in, which will either focus on the art of storytelling or feature some of Pierre’s storytelling style. They will also have the opportunity to work with one of her stories as part of the final production of the camp.
AiA began in 1994 as an outreach program of the Department of Creative and Festival Arts at UWI, St. Augustine. It uses Theatre in Education (TIE) techniques to engage participants. “We use Applied Creative Arts as a means of educating and empowering our participants on different issues, so we can do social issues, environmental issues, curriculum issues, any and everything basically, we will deal with but using theatre and the arts as a means to do that. A TIE performance workshop would comprise of a team building a performance and presenting it to an audience. We would then facilitate it using our interactive theatre-in-education strategies to get the children to either get to know the participants or to help bring about change within the conflict, because most of our performances in TIE would end in a sort of conflict that would need to be resolved. It’s very interactive, it’s very powerful, it’s very engaging.”
The first cycle of AiA’s Children’s Discovery Camp runs from July 11 to 30 and the second cycle runs from August 8 to 20. For more information on this and other AiA programs, call 289-(4AIA) or email: email@artsinaction.org.

Originally published in the T&T Guardian on July 10, 2016.