ABSTRACT
Known internationally for its maverick achievements in creating popular plays about the lives of working-class women, Jamaica’s Sistren Theatre Collective developed from humble beginnings when a group of women met in Kingston in 1977. The majority were part of a government project designed to help segments of the populace learn basic skills that would increase their opportunities for employment. For a national workers’ festival that year, the women, assisted by Honor Ford-Smith, a director from the Jamaican School of Drama, created and staged Downpression Get a Blow (1977), a sketch about employment conditions in a local women’s garment factory and management opposition to unionisation. This was the first of many Sistren plays to be developed from improvisation based on real-life stories by and about Jamaican women. Of the founding members of Sistren – Vivette Lewis, Cerene Stephenson, Lana Finikin, Pauline Crawford, Beverley Hanson, Jasmine Smith, Lorna Burrell Haslam, Beverley Elliot, Jerline Todd, Lillian Foster, May Thompson, Rebecca Knowles and Barbara Gayle – almost all were working class and most were single mothers. Their primary mission became to examine the ways in which women in their society are oppressed, particularly by men, but also by the broader structures that shape Jamaican culture. During the 1980s and 1990s, this mission involved the development and production of more than a dozen plays, some of which have won awards and/or toured within the Caribbean and to the United States and Europe. Sistren’s cultural work has also included running various workshops and education outreach programmes, and publishing a magazine dealing with women’s issues.
