I write to you as a graduate of the National School of Theatre Arts and Drama — the school that sits inside the National Cultural Centre — and as a theatre practitioner who has stood on that stage and sat in those seats.
I write in support of your own stated ambition for that building. Your ministers have said publicly that you have made it clear the National Cultural Centre is important to this country and must be fully restored. This letter supports that ambition. It asks only that the restoration be made equal to it.
Kaieteur News reports that the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport is inviting bids for a $545.7 million contract to rehabilitate the exterior of the National Cultural Centre and repair its structural cracks, with bids to be opened on 10 November.
The money is welcome, and the repairs are needed. My plea is that the tender be paused — not to stop the work, but to widen its scope before the money is committed — and that the project become a remodelling and expansion into the performance centre the country actually needs.
Guyana has one National Cultural Centre. Inside it there is one proscenium stage and one main auditorium. Beyond that, performers make do with foyer corners and stairway landings for anything smaller.
Every school concert, every drama festival, every dance company, every national celebration in this country queues for the same single room. That was the position fifty years ago, when the Centre opened, and after an exterior contract is spent it will still be the position — a cleaner face on the same bottleneck.
Producers who use the building say plainly what it lacks: sound and lighting enough for a full cast, backstage space where forty performers can wait for their cues, rooms to rehearse in. A facelift answers none of that.
Look at the houses the world knows by name. Radio City Music Hall at Rockefeller Center in New York. Lincoln Center, with its many halls on one plaza. The Kennedy Center in Washington. The Esplanade in Singapore, with stages, studios, teaching rooms and food under one roof.
In our own region, Trinidad and Tobago’s National Academy for the Performing Arts was designed the same way — several rooms, several kinds of work, one address that carries the country’s name. Guyana can set that standard here.
So I am not asking you to leave the cracks in the walls. I am asking for a redesign worthy of the building’s next fifty years:
- Keep the main auditorium, and add a second, smaller theatre — a flexible black-box stage for the productions that cannot fill 2,000 seats and should not have to.
- Add rehearsal rooms and modern lighting, sound and recording studios, so the Centre builds productions instead of only hosting them.
- Add private event rooms that companies, families and promoters can rent — launches, conferences, weddings, celebrations — so the Centre earns revenue toward its own upkeep instead of waiting on each year’s budget.
- Open a cultural food court, where Guyanese food is part of the night out, and a permanent arts and cultural museum and gallery, so our paintings, craft and history live in the same house as our performances.
- Add room for the Orange Economy — the creative industries: production studios for film, music and digital content, an artisan market for Guyanese craft, and affordable workspace where young producers, designers and promoters can build real businesses. That is how a cultural centre creates jobs, exports and tourism, and not only applause.
- Build a Presidential Cultural Hall — a state room for national honours, visiting heads and cultural diplomacy, in the building that already carries the nation’s name.
A centre built this way is One Guyana in practice: every region’s performers, every community’s food, craft and music, under one roof — space for creatives to come together, create and collaborate. And it is Brand Guyana on show: the address the world visits, films and remembers.
The bids open on 10 November. There is still time to pause, widen the brief, and let this investment buy modernisation and expansion instead of a repair bill. A country building highways and hotels and opening new river crossings can build its artists a house with more than one room in it.
I offer this as a practitioner, in support of the restoration you have already called for, and I am ready to sit at any table where the redesign is discussed.
Yours truly,
Jha’asryel-Akquil Bishop
Graduate, National School of Theatre Arts and Drama, Institute of Creative Arts (2015)
Theatre practitioner and teaching artist, Georgetown
