Vanessa Richards recalls a childhood filled with the sights and sounds of Caribbean culture, with cricket matches and steel pan drumming in Stanley Park.
Apart from the Caribbean Days Festival in North Vancouver, which was spawned by those picnics in Stanley Park, Richards rarely sees the presence of Caribbean culture in Vancouver acknowledged and celebrated.
When we talk about black history in Vancouver... sometimes people will acknowledge Hogans Alley, but I never hear about this seminal group of Caribbean people that came in the 50s and 60s during the whole Commonwealth explosion for education that made a really big difference, Richards said.
So when Jane Heyman, co-founder of the Performing Arts Lodge, asked her to produce the third Pioneers of Performance cabaret at the PAL Studio Theatre, the interdisciplinary artist decided to showcase the pioneering, mainly Caribbean, dancers, drummers and singers in the city.
Because of the nature of integration in our city, theres not so many places you can walk into and see black culture reflected, but its here and its real, Richards said.
Those who attend Skins and Steel, Nov. 10 and 11, will hear eminent pan player Kenrick Headley drum with The Afro Caribs, a small band of musicians who came to Vancouver from Trinidad in the mid 1950s to attend the University of B.C. and brought an explosion of calypso to the West Coast. Theyll see Thelma Gibson sing calypso with The Afro Caribs, as well as footage from 1954 of Gibson dancing on the musical variety show Bamboula, which aired on CBC Vancouver and featured a multiracial cast in an era when it was uncommon, and in some places, illegal. Theyll see archival photos of dancers and drumming and a short CBC documentary called They Too Shall Be One, which includes Richardss family (her mother was from Austria, her father, Trinidad).
It really speaks to the times, Richards said. They were interviewing scientists looking through microscopes to talk about gene pools and what does it mean to be mixed race and who has the dominant gene and some pretty curious and old-fashioned and weird things, and a lot of man-on-the street feedback ...[about] whether or not people who have mixed marriages should have children.
And theyll hear Richards sing a duet with her 76-year-old father, Rudy Richards, a dancer with the Afro Caribs who worked with African master drummer Olatunji, the man whose influential 1960s album Drums of Passion brought African and world music to western audiences in the 1960s.
Richards wants to honour the boldness of artists who came to Vancouver at a time when world music was just starting to be respected. She dubbed the celebration Skins and Steel, in part, to reference the bongo, congo and steel drums.
Its just playing with the construct of race and also the steely nerve it takes to be an artist who shares their work, she added.
Twitter: @Cheryl_Rossi
