Ashe to ‘edutain’ with new TV series
LOCAL FILM production is on a steady incline, and the Ashe Company will not be left in the valley. The standard-bearing performing-arts troupe is usually commanding a live stage with its actors, singers, musicians, and dancers. However, early next year may see those players positioned a bit differently. With a total of 13 episodes already shot and edited, the company’s executives are currently engaged in high-level discussions about distribution options for the first season of their television series, CHILL.
Conceptualised by Ashe’s executive director, Conroy Wilson, CHILL tells the story of a group of Jamaican millennials as they navigate the worlds of sex, love, and relationships.
The characters are pulled from diverse backgrounds, with a chillspot bar and grill in an ordinary community as their centrepiece set, in an ensemble that presents themes of love and loss, innocence and ‘adulting’, and stigma and discrimination. Dramatic as these preoccupations of millennials can be, the production’s purpose is not only to entertain but to ‘edutain’. Along with the CHILL characters, future viewing audiences should anticipate facing uncomfortable truths, especially with the HIV/ AIDS epidemic as a plot device. The series aims to address such realities and present them in a humorous, non-threatening way. As Wilson tells it, CHILL is an extension of everything the Ashe Company represents, performance and advocacy.
“Ashe does a lot of work in partnership with the Ministry of Health, in looking at the HIV epidemic and how we can use the arts to be able to reach and impact young people. We’ve been doing that since our inception in 1993. It’s not one of the things people know most about Ashe,”Wilson told The Gleaner.
At its office, the company offers counselling and testing services.
TRAINED FACILITATORS
“Our performers are also trained facilitators and what we call ‘edutainment intervention specialists’, who support outreach for the national HIV programme,” the executive director shared.
Over the years, Ashe has been dedicated to developing productions that can be used as teaching tools for the edification of attitudes and behaviours around sexual and reproductive health, targeting youth and their teachers and parents. Although the motivation remains the same, this method is different. Instead of a theatre run, Ashe aims for television. “We’re in some high-level discussions. We’re looking at both local and international distribution options. We tend to find our people are very in tune with what’s going on internationally. In fact, the young people we’re trying to reach probably watch way more international TV than they watch local TV,” Wilson said.
In a full embrace of the onestop-shop idea, the company did not have to step outside of itself to produce the series. It went to Ashe’s own Otaheite Kingdom.
Last year, Ashe coined the phrase ‘Otaheite Kingdom’, branding a renewed expansive approach to their operations and services, housing their own theatre space, a café and multimedia house on 8 Cargill Avenue. “A part of the Otaheiti
Kingdom is the multimedia arm of the performing-arts company. We do our films and our commercials internally. We have built the capacity for that, so we wanted to expand into mainstream, ”Wilson shared.
Wilson projects that viewers will be able to enjoy CHILL by the first quarter of next year.
Commissioned by USAID with support from the Ministry of Health, the series was written and directed by Micheal Holgate.