Dance Group Considers Legal Action after Disqualification from National Arts Festival over Gender Identity Challenge

Dance and theatrical group Praise Academy of Dance Barbados said Tuesday it is considering legal action after a piece it submitted to the National Independence Festival of Creative Arts (NIFCA) challenging gender identity teaching was disqualified.

Last Friday, Senator Gregory Nicholls, the Arbiter of the National Cultural Foundation (NCF), backed the cultural agency’s October decision to disqualify the group. He said there was “no basis to interfere with the prior decision of the judges of the entry Speak Life which was disqualified under rule 9B of the NIFCA rules”.

Attorney-at-law Davida Maynard-Holligan, who is representing Praise Academy of Dance, said the group had been “excluded in the name of inclusivity” from the competition and that the ruling from Senator Nicholls sent “a chilling message to Christians on the island, especially young students, who do not believe in and refuse to conform to confusing and harmful gender identity ideology and extreme teaching”.

“The message is that you can no longer disagree with or criticise LGBTQ ideology without being cancelled, marginalised and excluded. The ruling issued publicly amounts to an LGBTQ takeover of our legal rights and freedoms in Barbados and cannot go unchallenged,” she argued.

“It is a shameful day for the National Cultural Foundation, and the Praise Academy faces no alternative but to consider its legal options,” the lawyer added, expressing the opinion that the matter “should have been left to the Supreme Court to rule on”.

In his ruling, Senator Nicholls had stated: “The judges determined that the entry was in breach of the rules, more specifically, in that it exceeded the bounds of good taste. The entry was adjudged to have denounced various gender identities of the LGBTQ community via raging characterisations and expressions. This was a determination that the experienced panel of judges were entitled to make.”

But the arts school charged that he had “unconstitutionally” supported the NCF decision without referring the matter to the Supreme Court.

Explaining the production, Praise Academy said Speak Life presented a Christian viewpoint of gender identity and sexual orientation and declared the Christian worldview that there are only two genders. The performance rejected progressive gender education and instead promoted the protection of parental rights and the freedom to bring children up in line with Christian beliefs and not LGBT ideology.

The piece is abstracted from a show about a 15-year-old girl who is struggling with gender identity but finds her true identity through reading the Bible and God. It features a scene in a classroom involving songs and dialogue discussing biological facts and how chromosomes decide whether we are born male or female.

During the performance, the stage had banners with verses from the Book of Genesis which states: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”

Maynard-Holligan insisted that the disqualification of the piece on the grounds of discrimination amounts to a ban on the expression of the Christian faith.

“The show was performed on a government-owned, tax-funded stage and marks one of the first known instances of the Christian faith being oppressed in Barbados in public,” the lawyer said, contending that if the decision was left unchallenged it would have “serious ramifications for freedom of religion and expression in Barbados and across the Caribbean”. (PR/BT)