In November 2011 when the QUILT Performing Arts Company walked away with the Tallawah awards for Best Production & Best Director for a second straight year, it silenced naysayers & showed that the previous win was no fluke. The University of the West Indies’ annual dramatic arts festival, Tallawah, has seen youth from across the region showcase their best in drama, speech, story telling and poetry
. The fact that a group of young people, formed a little under a year ago won these coveted awards consecutively is remarkable. But they did more than that- winning awards for Best Costume, Best use of sound; best supporting actress (Patrice Anderson), Best lighting, a highly commended award for use of music. The group also won the inaugural Jamaica Association for Dramatic Artists award for best use for stage craft -now that’s nothing short of amazing. Being an avenue for young creative artists & performers, by young creative artists & performers, QUILT was born out of a need for a fresh, new, innovative way of creating performance art- a need to do things differently. You don’t have to take our word for it. Ask Tyrone Reid, award winning Jamaican writer & cultural critic. Reid aptly paints the company as ‘full of spectacle, zeal & raw intensity’ and, depicts Quilt’s winning production, ‘73’, as a ‘wholly engrossing fusion of poetry, theatre and music that provided a haunting meditation on the deadly May 2010 military invasion of West Kingston’s Tivoli Garden. He also described the group’s previous effort, 2010’s ‘Apostrophe’ as a ‘rebellious and plush examination of race relations & prejudice in the era of slavery’
According to Reid, Quilt’s future is ‘awfully bright, provided that they commit to the mission of offering transformative theater’
Indeed, our mission is to transform theatre. Using divised theatre as our main tool of expression and under the leadership of he 2010 Prime Minister Youth Awardee for Excellence in Arts and Culture, Mr. Rayon McLean, the group's main focus is to provide pieces that come with a strong social message that forces you to think and reflect, feel, laugh, learn and see our way of telling stories. And in case you’re wondering, QUILT is not an acronym. It is what it is- a combination of different personalities, talents, emotions, experiences, visions, words, to form a warm wonderful blanket of brilliance- a quilt.
