An Artistically Expressed Film About our Ancestral Experience

[Miguel Sague Jr]

Full Circle: A Taino Story Not just another story about the extinction of the Tainos, This dramatic piece tells the story of a people's love for each other and for their land, and how that love transcended conquest and environmental destruction

The Crystal Parrot Players has embarked on an exploration about the lost people of the Taino Indians. Through the combination of dramatic story and research sciences, CPP presents a new film that blends the study and portrayal of their lifeways. History tells us that within 15 years of Columbus’ arrival, several million Lucayans and Tainos from the Bahamas, Haiti/Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Cuba and Puerto Rico were eliminated in the genocide and ecocide that followed in his wake.  Sandra Riley began her research on Christopher Columbus and the Lucayan Indians in 1973 for the Columbus Landing Company in San Salvador and ten years later published Homeward Bound, a definitive history of the Bahamas to 1850.  In 1988 the Bahamas Postal Department sponsored Sandra Riley and artist Alton Lowe to further research Columbus’ arrival in San Salvador for its Quincen-tennial stamp collection.  MacMillan Caribbean commissioned the collective research efforts of Alton Lowe and Sandra Riley and published their book The Lucayans in 1991. As the lost civilizations of the Mayans, Aztecs and Anasazis have been the subject of great speculation, intense research and high drama, the story of the Lucayans must also be told.  Full Circle will not only provide the CPP with an opportunity to entertain, but also to educate.  This new film is a perfect tool to use as a springboard for public discussion about the cosmology and heritage of Caribbean natives and raise awareness about indigenous cultures everywhere. Through our ongoing community relationships and audience development events, it is the hope of the Crystal Parrot Players that our programs will instigate a dialogue between leading artists, our audiences and participating scholars of various disciplines.  Our ultimate creation of a dramatic documentary of our collaborative exploration about these native people can simultaneously be displayed nationally and internationally at public parks and facilities, such as museums, libraries, universities, ports as well as preservation and historical sites and film festivals and other arts venues. Specifically, the purpose of Full Circle: A Taino Story is to create a true marriage between the magic of the dramatic arts and the science of anthropology.  We have made a commitment to this project, and hope that the investors of our initial matching funds as well as individual donors see our project successfully come to fruition.  Once we complete our final phases of production this year, we will begin to concentrate on promoting our film on an international level.  Future screening opportunities of Full Circle: A Taino Story would include activities such as unique historical site tours, traveling interactive museum exhibits and, more importantly, encourage more discussion panels between historians, archaeologists, anthropologists and artists residing locally and abroad. The long-awaited World Premiere and celebration of the Taino story was screened on Monday, September 29, 2008 at Miami’s Tower Theater.

 

http://crystalparrot.org/content/view/13/27/