RAY FUNK
Rawle Gibbons, one of TT’s most noted playwrights, has a new play on the music of pan legend Ray Holman, Pantopia.
Gibbons is the author of a number of plays, but best known for his trilogy on calypso history, Sing de Chorus, Ah Wanna Fall, and Ten to One, produced through his Camboulay Productions. The first two were revived in 2018 and 2019.
Pantopia is Gibbons’s second play about pan. The first, Ogun Ayan – As in Pan, was performed in March 2006 at the Scherzando Pan Theatre.
It was a very different type of play. Scholar Louis Regis noted, “The action of Ogun Iyan is set in the spirit kingdom of the Yoruba religion, in orisha yard (sacred space for Yoruba ritual practice), and in the steelband yard (temporal space).”
While that play looked at the origins of pan, this one focuses on the music of one of its greatest innovators.
Ray Holman grew up playing in Invaders, then spending many years with Starlift, but went on to be a Panorama arranger for many other steelbands.
Also a noted soloist, he has performed in many settings. He has been an in-demand teacher for US pan ensembles from coast to coast, and had a tenure at the University of Washington and as far away as Alaska, as well as performing all over the world.
He was awarded the Chaconia Gold medal back in 1988 and an honorary doctorate from UWI in 2021.
Pantopia came about because Gibbons had long wanted to work with Holman. He said, “Back in the days when I was at the Creative Arts Centre at UWI, I always wanted to work with Ray, because Ray is one of our most prolific and important composers but it never happened for one reason or another.
But when he got the honorary degree, I felt that this was an opportunity for us to explore his work. Getting a degree is all well and good, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that your work is given the kind of attention that it deserves. So I’m using the medium of theatre to bring his work to another audience. I was interested not so much in his personal story, but in the story of his music.”
Holman sent Gibbons a lot of his music, and Gibbons selected what he thought he could use to “construct a storyline of a composer/arranger dissatisfied with the state of things in pan and wanting to change the music, to do something different, which brings him in conflict with the band.
There’s a period when he drifts away, not just from music, but it’s a kind of drift where he’s questioning himself, finding out what he’s really about. Some of his tunes had no lyrics. I had to write new lyrics and in other cases, to change existing lyrics to suit the situation.”
There have been a number of other plays about pan over the years, starting with Errol Hill’s Ping Pong from 1958, and including Nobel laureate Derek Walcott’s musical Steel, produced in Trinidad in 2005.
Ronald Amoroso has written three that have been performed in school competitions in Trinidad. There was a play on the history of pan that was regularly performed in the early 1970s at the Casablanca panyard in Belmont.
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