Jeff Henry leaves ineradicable mark on Black theatre in Canada
March 10, 2021
As the ‘Show Boat’ controversy unfolded in the city nearly three decades ago, Dr. Jeff Henry put on his activist hat and was on the frontlines with demonstrators opposed to the musical.
‘Show Boat’ tells the story of a family-run floating theatre plying the Mississippi with Black characters accepting their submissive fate.
"The exploitation of blacks in the post-Reconstruction South is part of the structure of 'Show Boat’,” he told the New York Times in an interview in May 1993.
Henry, an academic who excelled in dance and theatre, has died at age 98.
As a 16-year-old in Trinidad & Tobago, he collaborated with the late Courtney Ferreira to organize Monday mas, ‘Hawaiian Dancers’.
A member of Beryl McBurnie's Little Carib Theatre, Henry accompanied the renowned dancer on her lecture tour of Jamaica in 1957 and also trained dancers and choreographed for a pantomime, ‘Busha Bluebeard’ in which the late Louise Bennett-Coverley (Miss Lou) played the lead role.
Dr. Jeff Henry was the recipient of the 2009 Trinidad & Tobago Consul General Diaspora Award (Photo by Ron Fanfair)
After studying in England and New York, Henry accepted a job offer at the National Theatre School in Montreal. He co-founded Black Theatre Workshop in Montreal in 1971 before coming to Toronto and launching Theatre Fountainhead three years later.
A year earlier in 1973, Vera Cudjoe, who is 92, established Black Theatre Canada, the city’s first Black theatre company.
Amah Harris, who founded Theatre in the Rough and directed Black Theatre Canada’s first show in 1973, said funders attempted to force Henry and Cudjoe to merge their companies.
“Jeff and Vera, who were close friends, stood their ground and said no way,” she recounted. “They made it clear they had separate mandates and visions. They also wanted to know why they weren’t asking the White theatre companies, of which there was a large number, to do the same thing.”
Harris said Henry has left an indelible mark in Black theatre in Canada.
“He was very vibrant, strong, dynamic and conscious of the fact that Black people had to make a stand,” she added.
As Black Fountainhead Artistic Director, Henry provided opportunities for many Black actors to play significant roles on stage.
They included Henry Gomez who was cast as Estragon in Samuel Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’.
“I got that through Jeff,” said the retired Toronto District School Board Principal and cultural activist. “He was one of my mentors and I learnt a lot from him.”
Dr. Jeff Henry (c) with Share newspaper publisher Arnold Auguste (l) & late community activist Dudley Laws at the 1994 African-Canadian Achievement Awards (Photo by Ron Fanfair)
In his three decades at York University before retiring as a Senior Scholar in 1994, Henry chaired the Faculty of Fine Arts and helped to create an exchange program between York University and the University of the West Indies for students and faculty.
He was also active behind the scenes, assisting with the delivery of the city annual Caribbean carnival parade. In addition to advising, he was a parade judges’ coordinator.
In 2008, Henry launched his first book, ‘Under the Mas: Resistance and Rebellion in the Trinidad Masquerade’.
In a compelling blend of personal recollections, interviews, scholarly research and empirical arguments, he explored the way in which traditional characters in the masquerade were used by the newly freed masses of Trinidad & Tobago to register their discontent at the realities of their predicament.
The book also explores the ability of the African to change ordinary daily occurrences into dramatic scenarios in form and presentation and it argues against the superficial and empty direction in which the Trinidad masquerade has evolved where even those playing traditional characters do not have a sense of the history or the evolution of their characters.
“It’s not that I don’t want people to not have fun because when there was emancipation, they had fun back then,” Henry told me in an interview in June 2008. “But you can’t move away from your roots. You have to know why you are having fun.”
Henry was the recipient of several honours, including the African-Canadian Achievement Award in 1994 and the 2009 Trinidad & Tobago Consul General Diaspora Award for Excellence in Dance, Culture & Academia.
He is survived by his wife Frances and children Terrence and Miriam.
