Past event
Saints Talk: Professor Julia Prest Colonial-Era Caribbean Theatre - Then and Now
Development are delighted to invite you to the next instalment in our Saints Talk series from Professor Julia Prest, ‘Colonial-Era Caribbean Theatre — Then and Now” on Wednesday 15 November at 5.15pm GMT via Microsoft Teams.
Theatre was popular across the Caribbean region during the colonial era, and playhouses were built in, among other places, Jamaica, Cuba, Saint-Domingue, Martinique, Suriname and New Orleans. The theatrical repertoire was mostly imported from Europe, and it has often been assumed — wrongly — that colonial theatre was merely an inferior copy of the metropolitan model. European works were performed before mixed but segregated audiences and adapted to local conditions. New Creole works were also created, some of them claiming to portray the lives of local people, including the enslaved. Taking Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti) as her case study, Julia Prest will investigate the richness and complexity of public theatre in the colonial Caribbean, including its relationship to slavery and enslaved people. She will also present her recent collaborations with theatre-makers in which they sought to make colonial-era theatre speak productively to modern audiences in Scotland, Martinique and (thanks to live-streaming) across the world via new writing and creative adaptation.
Julia Prest is Professor of French and Caribbean Studies at the University of St Andrews. Her research is on the history, theory and practice of early modern French and Caribbean theatre, including opera and dance. She enjoys collaborating with amateur and professional theatre-makers to create new productions that bring colonial-era theatre to today's audiences.
Julia's latest monograph, Public Theatre and the Enslaved People of Colonial Saint-Domingue (Palgrave Macmillan), and her edited volume, Colonial-Era Caribbean Theatre: Issues in Research, Writing and Methodology (Liverpool University Press), were published respectively in April and September 2023.