MATHURINE EMMANUEL - ACTRESS, DIRECTOR, SCREENWRITER
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Mathurine Emmanuel
Actress, Director, Screenwriter Mathurine Emmanuel is the creative energy and force behind Iyanola Pictures and Vizyon De Lavi. Born and raised in Desruisseaux, Micoud, she was the sixth of twelve children of Gerald Charles St. Ange, and Mary Francita St. Ange. She attended the Desruisseaux Combined School, the Micoud Junior Secondary School, the Vieux Fort Secondary School and the Sir Arthur Lewis Community College where she graduated with a teaching diploma. Beginning at age seventeen, Ms. Emmanuel has spent most of her adult life teaching. She taught twenty-three years at the Desruisseaux and Blanchard Combined Schools, and, retiring from the public school system in 2000, she took up a teaching position at the Montessorie Center, a private primary school at Rodney Heights. |
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Mathurines drama career started at the age of eight when she and her younger sister Lina Frederick, concocted a piece of drama they called Van Geest. Echoing farmers distress over low banana prices, in Van Geest the two girls impersonated adults by beefing up their breast and buttocks with banana straw and in the midst of dance, song and parody, delivered the lines.
Sé moun la nou ka twavai bai Van Geest
Van Geest ka bon nou dé sou pa mwa
Sé moun la es ou kwe Bondié di sa?
The people we are working for Van Geest
Van Geest is giving us two cents a month
The people do you think God said that?
So delighted was the community by this drama, that they momentarily forgot their financial misery and coughed up pennies to reward the budding actresses. Since these preteen years, Mathurine has never stopped bringing tears to the eyes and laughter to the heart of her audiences. Throughout her public school teaching career she whipped up her students into drama groups that staged plays at term-end concerts, in the process raising plenty of funds for school needs. |
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While Mathurine was turning her students into actors and actresses, with Vizyon De Lavi she was taking her talent to larger stages. The group has held charity concerts for special causes, including concerts in aid of St. Judes Hospital, and besides holding concerts in different parts of the island they have staged plays at schools across the south. Keeping true to their objectives, some of the funds raised from these concerts were used to help needy members of the community. For example, the group paid the airfare of a cancer patient seeking treatment in the U.K., and made several monthly loan payments for an elderly man devastated when his boat was stolen and was left with no means of repaying his boat loan.
Ms. Emmanuel has used her God-given talent to assist her community, to entertain, to expose social ills, to disseminate positive social values, and by teaming up with young people to bring us her productions she has instilled in them a sense of self worth and accomplishment which will no doubt serve them well in all other aspects of their lives.
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Deruisseaux Post Office, Micoud · St. Lucia, West Indies