For Dr Danielle Elliott, 50 is just a number

For educator and visual and performing artist Dr Danielle Elliott, there is no “going downhill” at age 50.

Instead, she intends to fulfil her dream of performing a one-woman show, From Belmont to Brooklyn…And Back, in her persona of Danielle Debonair, at Kafe Blue (formerly Kaiso Blues), Wrightson Road, Port of Spain on July 28.

“For me this half-century year is pivotal. Putting something out with vulnerability, with courage, fulfilling my dream. I really wanted other people to see all parts of that. What is your dream that you’ve been holding on to? Go ahead and try it.

“Even the way we think about ageing in Trinidad and Tobago is different than elsewhere. Sometimes people start to talk about ‘going down’ when they reach 50 or 60.

"I don’t think that has to be the case. It could be a time to begin something, to try something new, be inspired by your own life and see, in turn, what other lives you can inspire.”

In From Belmont to Brooklyn…And Back – A One-Woman Show, Elliott is playing different characters of varying genders and ages.

She describes it as a humorous and thought-provoking journey of self-discovery.

She said the longer she lives the more she wants to give life advice and tell people what she has learned, but in a gentle way that is not condescending, so people can take from it whatever they can and use, and leave the rest.

Elliott told WMN she has always shared funny or dramatic things that happened to her with others, in person and on social media.

“It was not until I was in the US in grad school that I realised a lot about who I am as a Trinidadian and as a person from the Caribbean. It was when somebody said, ‘Wow, your life is so anecdotal. It’s the way you tell it,’ that I started to notice that’s a Trini thing.

"We really are storytellers and dramatic people.”

She said she always loved performing.

She got her first taste in Sunday school and later in theatre classes at Bishop Anstey High School, and, throughout the years, it remained an interest and passion.

As an English literature professor, she found ways to make a moment theatrical when she lectured or gave a talk, or ways to get on a stage.

She also thought abstractly about doing her own show, rather than looking for plays and shows by others that were expressions of herself and her interests.

In 2008, she started solidifying her ideas about that future show.

She began collecting her and other people’s anecdotes and stories – the good and the bad, the big and the seemingly insignificant, even Carnival stories – as she believes life, what goes into making a person who they are or will become, is fascinating.

And she is curious what would come out if people stopped to take stock of their lives.

At the beginning of the pandemic in TT, during the lull of lockdowns, she, like many others, took the time to reflect on herself and her life.

“When TT opened up, it was a kind of metaphor for me, maybe I should be opening up about my show too. And I really wanted to get it done before my 50th birthday on August 16.

“I thought about the things I wanted to say and it was the same message I had in mind from 2008 when I first started to think about doing a show – that this life is a lot of things but it’s amazing. The journey that we’re on in life, all the steps and experiences that make up any life, is really fascinating.”

Rediscover yourself

Born in New York to Trinidadian parents, Elliott moved to TT when she was a toddler. She left TT after fifth form and her family moved to Antigua and then to other Caribbean countries.

They eventually returned to New York where she attended Brooklyn College at the City University of New York and got degrees in Africana Studies and English Literature. She then attended Princeton University where she received her masters in English literature, and, in 2009, her PhD.

Elliott describes herself as a recovering academic, as she was an English Literature professor for eight years with her last posting at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Around age 33, she performed in the Vagina Monologues in North Carolina.

“It was the pilot light that had been lit, that fire from secondary school and before, that was on again. I wanted to find more ways and places to do this.

“At some point I decided that (being an English professor) was not what I want to do when I grow up.

"As much as I loved the experience, there was a restlessness. I wanted to figure out how to do this stuff my way – education, the arts, performance, visual art.

"I could never figure out how to get everything I wanted to do into the container of English professor. And it was because I couldn’t. So all I could see was, at some point I would have to go off on my own.

“And so, in 2012, I left that career, started a few businesses with some success, some failure, and eventually ended up coming back to Trinidad to stay a little longer each time I visited.

“I think because I made the big move to leave my career, I decided I wanted to have a life that was not a default life but a designed life.

"I asked myself what I wanted to do. What have I always wanted to try? What do I want my life to look like? And I started designing it from now rather that wait till I was 75 to figure it out."

She tried things she had been interested in and wanted to do, including starting a style and image consultancy, and a puppeteering company called Fuzzy World Puppets.

Why puppets?

She explained since she first saw Sesame Street when she was six years old, she wanted to be on and work for the show. She said the puppets allow for a suspension of disbelief, and can touch the children in adults.

Elliott said, for From Belmont to Brooklyn…And Back – A One-Woman Show, she will be drawing on the same skills in puppetry – listening to the audience, improvising, and being a decent actor using different voices and accents.

She also starred in the title role of the 2021 production The Revenge of King Jab Jab, and worked with theatre luminaries Wendell Manwarren and Ellen Camps in the Mentoring by the Masters Project offered by the Ministry of Community Development, Culture and the Arts.

In 2018, she visited TT intending to stay a few months for Carnival. Four months turned to six months, then she heard about the Mentoring by the Masters Project and stayed for it, then she stayed to perform at a show.

She said she felt like a tourist who was rediscovering her country and herself and she wanted to explore everything.

“I returned home to Brooklyn for about a month and a half with the intention of returning to TT for a longer time intentionally, which I did. I thought I would leave after 2020 Carnival but then there was the lockdown and I was stuck.

"The thing about that was, during that period, things shifted for me.

“Before it was, ‘My home is in Brooklyn and I’m trying to create a life for myself in TT.’ Then it flipped. It was, ‘My home is in TT and I also have things to manage and take care of in Brooklyn.’”

She said the change in thinking happened gradually but it was a “delightful surprise.” During that time she rediscovered and reinvented her “Trinidadian self” and found her place in TT.

In 2019, she started Bright Antilles which designs innovative, holistic learning solutions for people of all ages.

With Fuzzy World Puppets, she uses storytelling to deliver messages to audiences of all ages in innovative and imaginative ways.

Through those companies, she gets to do education her way and make a difference in the way people think about education with talks, educational camps and workshops, and individual consultations with parents and children.

She would like it to become a Caribbean-wide initiative.

“I help kids with their executive function, how to bring mindfulness to educational practices so that they don’t only get the reading, writing, arithmetic part, but they learn something about themselves and have an enjoyable learning life as a student.

“We focus too much on passing exams. We need to find ways to engage young people as learners, to respect them enough to find out how they learn, to explain why they are doing what they’re doing. We miss the opportunity to educate the heart when we’re only educating the mind in that way.”

She said children already have a light inside them. What educators have to do is try not to put it out.