This year’s Essay Film Festival opened with a programme showcasing 10 newly digitised films from the Cinenova collection. One of these films, Sweet Sugar Rage, uses collective performance to discuss and combat unacceptable working conditions.
Sweet Sugar Rage (Sistren Theatre Collective, 1985). Courtesy of Sistren Theatre Collective and Cinenova Distribution
Sweet Sugar Rage travels to the sugarcane plantations of “New Sugar Town” in Clarendon, Jamaica to bring to light the terrible labour conditions of the women who tend and till its land. Their experiences—of back-breaking work in the sun-baked fields, of indifferent trade unions, and many mouths to feed—are at the heart of Sistren’s collectively-devised theatrical work and final film. A feminist theatre collective founded in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1977, Sistren was predominantly made up of working-class Jamaican women using drama for social and political advocacy; in this case, to bridge the gap between urban and rural women’s experiences of work and gender discrimination. The rural women’s testimonies are first presented to camera in the form of interviews and later alchemized into theatre by way of so-called “drama-in-education workshops.” It’s these workshops—as tools for feminist consciousness-raising, as laboratories for workshopping solutions to women’s issues, and for making accessible radical ideas through alternative forms of pedagogy—that really caught my imagination at the Essay Film Festival.
Fuse magazine, November/December 1981
Sistren—meaning ‘sisters’—played an integral role in the Caribbean women’s movement, setting up numerous social initiatives and outreach programmes with a focus on personal testimony and group analysis of women’s issues. The group continues to this day, albeit in a transformed set-up (for instance, Sistren mostly work on violence prevention and now include male members). Sistren were particularly renowned for their collaborative drama workshops, which drew on the radical theories of experimental theatre practitioners including Brazilian playwright Augusto Boal’s The Theatre of the Oppressed and Colombian playwright Enrique Buenaventura's Theory of the Committed Theatre. Sistren’s work brings to mind the work of radical feminist theatre collectives like Holocaust women’s theatre in ‘70s Britain and U.S. countercultural and political fringe theatre groups like The Living Theatre, The San Francisco Theatre, and the Bread and Puppet Theatre. But Sistren’s work is also unique in combining radical pedagogy and guerrilla street theatre with Jamaican oral and folk traditions including traditional singing, dancing, masks, and mime. Sistren’s innovative project of inclusive radical pedagogy would, it was hoped, cross the boundaries of race and class in Jamaica.
Front Cover of Fuse magazine, November/December 1981
This multi-pronged approach strives for “a constant process of consciousness raising,” as Honor Ford-Smith, the film’s co-director and Sistren co-founder, described it in Fuse magazine in 1981. Riffing on both the second-wave feminist notion of consciousness-raising as well as Paolo Freire’s idea of “conscientization,” where participants develop a critical awareness of their social reality through reflecting and acting on their experiences, Sistren sought to unite urban and rural women in Jamaica through identifying their shared and divergent concerns. The idea was to create an environment where women could support and empower each other, where problems could be workshopped collectively and solutions found as a team. Scholars like Karina Smith have written about how, ultimately, Sistren failed to bridge the barriers of race and class, but Sweet Sugar Rage nevertheless traces this attempt in action. The film captures the unfolding of a social and pedagogical experiment, showing both the working conditions of the rural women and the Collective’s attempt to translate them into political advocacy.
Sweet Sugar Rage opens to Winston Bell’s song “Sweep On,” which sings of the struggles of sugar workers to juggle their parenting duties with long and badly paid labour. As the song plays, we watch a woman engaged in the drudgery of running a house before going on to jump in a car with other members of Sistren and drive out into the country. Sistren’s journey to the sugarcane fields documents some of their discussions on how to mobilise the rural women, and the importance of the rehearsal space. The film soon cuts to the sugar workers’ testimonies, which highlight the abominable working conditions on the estate, marked in the lines on their exhausted faces. Life on the plantation is hard and dangerous: the hours are long and the work is active, hot, and exhausting. There is clearly a lack of supportive infrastructure: warnings of nasty fertilizers that harm the workers’ skin are ignored, and women have to supply and pay for their own tools. Many of the women refuel on the sugar cane and seemingly little else. Poverty is rife. There are stark differences in how the men and women are paid. The male trade unionists simply don’t care.
Sweet Sugar Rage (Sistren Theatre Collective, 1985). Courtesy of Sistren Theatre Collective and Cinenova Distribution
Juxtaposing these testimonies are the collaborative workshops and the final performances, which transform one of the women’s stories — that of Miss Iris — into an effervescent drama involving group participation. The emphasis here is on the experiential: they invite the urban audience to physically identify with the rural women’s struggle through physical movement and role-playing. The bending down and tilling of the sugarcane fields is turned into a mime, while masks help to identify the different characters. Children join in the performance; there is lots of dancing and plenty of laughing. Later on, the group are invited to role-play alternative solutions to the women’s predicament, sharing their resources and advice as they work through possible outcomes. How does it actually feel to walk a day in their shoes?
Showing alongside another very different investigation of women’s work, Sheffield Film Co-op’s A Question of Choice (1982), Sweet Sugar Rage forms part of a wider series titled The Work We Share, showcasing newly digitized works from the feminist film and video distributor, Cinenova. This double bill not only links back to Cinenova’s own legacy of feminist collectivity—formed back in 1991 when the feminist collective Circles merged with Cinema of Women (COW)—but also highlights what’s possible when different groups of women come together for their communities, to explore the work that they share.
The 2022 edition of the Essay Film Festival runs from 19 March - 23 April 2022
Cinenova is a volunteer-run charity preserving and distributing the work of feminist film and video makers. Their The Work We Share programme will tour partner organisations around the UK throughout 2021-2022.
Sophia Satchell-Baeza is a writer and editor, focusing on artists' film, psychedelic art, and the 1960s counterculture.