In his documentary SteelPan Now! Notes on Where Pan Gone, Ryan Saunders and his co-producer Aaron Astillero trace the spread of the steelpan beyond the shores of Trinidad and Tobago.
The documentary, which premiered at the Trinidad + Tobago Film Festival, looks at the growth of the steelpan but from a foreign perspective.
The documentary follows several steelpan pioneers, inventors, players, composers, arrangers, and pan makers of various backgrounds across several cities in the United States who’ve spent decades involved in the steelpan movement.
Among the people featured in the documentary is the late Ellie Mannette, Arranger and lecturer Liam Teague, Renegades arranger Duvonne Stewart, Johnathan Scales, composer, musician, founder of the band Fourscales and Kyle Dunleavy, an American pan builder from Philadelphia.
“My co-producer and I got around to talking about my film Bacchanal Time, and I believe I told him about it and he was looking to do a project and we started brainstorming. We had these grand visions and he told me when he was at Penn State he saw a Jamaican Steelband and was blown away by the performance. I said you haven’t really heard Steelband if that band was from Jamaica and we got around to talking about the Steelband and we decided to look at steelpan music,” said Saunders, a Trinidadian.
“That was 2014 or 2015. We were going around to a couple of different places and ended up in Virginia Beach, where there is an annual steelpan competition for high schools and colleges. We went there and that was when I saw American youth from the ages of seven to nine playing steelpan so comfortably and with knowledge of the music and skill. It blew me away and I said to myself this is where pan gone, a sort of realisation of that whole question from back on the day,” he further explained.
Saunders is no stranger to exploring West Indian culture in foreign spaces. His work includes short films and videos that explore his and others’ experiences as Caribbean immigrants in North America.
One such project, ‘Look Ma Dese Streets Not Paved with Gold’ screened at several festivals and galleries in the Baltimore/Washington region.
In 2002, he produced with Malkia Lydia the documentary video Mother Dot’s Philadelphia which explored Philadelphia’s Jazz clubs that nurtured many of the Jazz greats of the 40s and 50s.
In 2003, Saunders released his feature-length documentary Bacchanal Time: The People’s Carnival, which explored the initial history and spread of the Trinidad-styled Carnival to North America.
Bacchanal Time won Best Caribbean Themed Film at the 5th Annual Jamerican Film Festival.
Saunders, who holds a BA in Visual and Performing Arts at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, and an MFA in Film and Media Arts at Temple University, told Loop News that with SteelPan Now! Notes on Where Pan Gone, he wanted to explore the nuances of the issue of pan’s popularity.
“If you are writing back home saying this is where pan went and providing that information it could be seen in a good or bad light, I just wanted to explore the nuances and different styles. I am not a pan expert so it was also a learning experience for me about the steelpan,” said Saunders, who has held the position of Technical Director at Philadelphia Public Access Corporation for the past two years.
Saunders said he expects the documentary to generate a conversation.
“Within and without the pan fraternity, I expect anybody who is going to be able to see it would come away either agreeing or on the other side. There will be people who say look they take the pan and gone with it. I believe there is this sort of consternation from the articles I read, you get a lot of negativity on what people are doing and where pan is going, there is a lot of room for conversation. I think there should be conversations round pan, where it is going, what people are doing and about those folks who left and shared their knowledge,” he said.
One of the biggest achievements for Saunders in the production of this documentary was scoring an interview with Mannette.
This was possibly the last interview for the man known as the father of the modern steel pan who passed away in 2018.
“It was not intended,” said Saunders. “We were on Virginia for two to three days for the Ellie Mannette Festival of Steel and I knew he was based there but he wasn’t actually involved in the competition though it bore his name. I kept asking the organisers if he was there and if we could get a quick interview. They said some days he is good and others bad but one evening standing in front of me was Ellie Mannette himself and he is introducing himself like he knew me for years. I asked if I could interview him and he said come across. He was happy to talk,” Saunders recalled.
Asked what it was like working with his co-producer, Astillero, who is American and knew nothing about the instrument, Saunders said he brought some different insights during the interview sessions.
“With things like the e-pan for instance his insight was more on the potential of the steelpan, the lack of support and not seeing that full potential musically, where the instrument can go and steps to make it bigger, more universal, more common, so those insights were good to know and see beyond the wow factor,” he said.
A native of Philadelphia, Astillero is an American writer, director, and producer who co-wrote, Changing the Game (2012), a film that was distributed by Barnholtz Entertainment and Lions Gate Entertainment.
He also wrote, directed, and produced Skullz (2014), a children’s television show that aired on the Comcast and Verizon networks, serving the Philadelphia area. Astillero also worked in production and camera crew roles for several local public access.
This is the first time Saunders has had a film in the ttff and he is very excited to have it premiere in the land where the steel pan was invented.
Following the screening at ttff, Saunders will look into self-distribution and getting the film into other festivals.
For more info go to www.steelpan.now.
Source: Loop News
