Malick founder’s faith

AS WITH so many figures in the cultural realm, it is hard to capture the contribution made by Norvan Lloyd Fullerton.

Mr Fullerton, who died last Thursday at the age of 75, was the founder of the Malick Folk Performing Company. If that troupe is today a household name it is not just because it has won the Prime Minister’s Best Village Trophy Competition more than a dozen times, but also because of its near-ubiquitous presence, due, in no small measure, to its close association with the agenda of national unity.

Though today Mr Fullerton, often fondly called “Fuller,” is associated with the performance arts, his journey to the stage was circuitous. Born on November 19, 1948, to Constance Rose Fullerton and Norman Lloyd Fullerton, he was initially a police officer, working administration in Port of Spain. But one day, in 1970, it was suggested he join a drama group.

Mr Fullerton became a member of the Company of Players, which was led by playwright, actor and director Ronald Amoroso. In those days, the group rehearsed at the National Museum and Art Gallery, a stone’s throw away from the Queen’s Park Savannah. After rehearsals, he would hear rousing noises coming from the Savannah. He discovered Best Village.

“From there, I started going to the Savannah after rehearsals,” he said.

It was the start of an interest that saw him get involved with groups participating in the competition, until, in 1979, he resolved, alongside figures like Roland Villaroel and Noel Blandin, to convert what was then called the Diego Martin Chorus to what would become the Malick Folk Performing Company the next year.

The rest, as they say, is history. In 1993, Malick twinned with the Shiv Shakti Dance Company in a seminal pairing. So too was its fusion with the Barbados folk performing group Pinelands Creative Workshop to stage Earl Lovelace's The Wine of Astonishment in Trinidad, several years earlier.

Mr Fullerton was awarded the Chaconia Medal (silver) in 2003.

But as his career trajectory suggests, Mr Fullerton’s contribution was multifaceted. Within the world of drama, his first appearance on stage was as Capt Horster in Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, directed by Mr Amoroso.

The latter’s turn to local writing, such as 1973’s The Master of Carnival, inspired Mr Fullerton’s own progression. If he began his career with Ibsen, he ended it with obeah. His work, Obeah, A Calypso Musical, regarded as the first of its kind, was revived last year at Queen’s Hall, St Ann’s, by Malick, almost four decades after its debut.

“We lose not just an artist but a custodian of our cultural identity,” remarked Shamfa Cudjoe, the Community Development Minister, upon Mr Fullerton’s passing.

Yet if his long career stood for anything, it stood for not only cultural preservation, but also unwavering faith in the transformative power of the stage itself.