Description
One of the most innovative companies to have achieved world acclaim in the last half of the twentieth century, the National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica blends the lore, music and dance traditions of Jamaica, the wider Caribbean and the American South with both Modern and European classical ballet forms. This richly illustrated history, as sequel to the earlier Dance Jamaica – Cultural Definition and Artistic Discovery, celebrates the Company’s first forty-five years.
This is the story of how a group of unpaid dancers, musicians, choreographers, designers and technicians became one of the most influential cultural voices of the Third World. The work describes the Company’s continuing efforts through the dedication, commitment and sustained application of its members to forge an organic vocabulary, technique and style of Caribbean dance art against the background of the wider society’s history of severance, suffering and survival. The author shows how the Company achieved it’s ambition to secure for the Jamaican people a way of articulating their identity and of building faith in a historical reality denied by three centuries of colonial subjugation.
The tours of the internationally acclaimed National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica have taken them to all parts of the world – from London’s Sadler Wells to Mexico City’s Palacio de Bellas Artes, from the Theatre Royal in Sydney, to the Palace of Culture in Kiev. The Company has also performed at numerous venues throughout the United States, including at the Gusman Theatre in Miami, the New Orleans Theatre of Music and Performing Arts, the New York City Centre Theatre.
About the Authors
The Honourable Rex Nettleford is a founder, a former lead dancer and currently the principal choreographer and since 1967, the sole artistic director of the national Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica. He has staged and choreographed several musicals and revues in his native Jamaica and in Britain as well as advised on the staging of the Broadway musical Reggae. A Rhodes Scholar, Rex Nettleford is a leading Caribbean academic currently serving as Vice Chancellor Emeritus and a Distinguished Fellow at the University of the West Indies where he edits Caribbean Quarterly, the University’s Cultural Studies journal. In 1975 he was awarded the high national honour of Order of Merit; in 1981 the prestigious Gold Musgrave Medal and in 2008 the high ranking Order of the Caribbean Community for his artistic and scholarly work. He is also the recipient of several honorary doctorates from universities on both sides of the Atlantic. Professor Nettleford is the author of Mirror, Mirror – Identity, Race and protest in Jamaica, Caribbean Cultural Identity – The Case of Jamaica. Roots and Rhythms – Dance Jamaica Cultural Definition and Artistic Discovery. Inward Stretch, Outward Reach – A Voice from the Caribbean among other publications.
Maria LaYacona has been the NDTC’s official photographer since the early 1960s and has illustrated both Roots and Rhythms which she also designed and Dance Jamaica – Cultural Definition and Artistic Discovery, the two previous publications on the Jamaican Dance Company. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, US, she studied photography with her father, Mario LaYacona and at the Winona School of Photography in Warsaw, Indiana. She then worked as a photojournalist in New York City in the 1950s and later established a professional practice in Jamaica. She joined the NDTC in 1964 as a full-fledged voluntary member and has since produced two major works of photography – Jamaica Portraits 1955-1988 and more recently Jamaica Reverie – 1955-2005 – both of which have won high critical acclaim.
Contents
PROLOGUE: Renewal and Continuity the NDTC in Transition
- Avatar and Living Monument: The NDTC 1962–2007
- The Bridge Generation and Early Renewal: The Nineteen Eighties and Nineteen Nineties
- The Later Renewal: The Mid Nineties and After
- The Music of the NDTC its Singers and Musicians
- The Repertoire
- Technique(s), Vocabulary and Style
- The Artistic Direction, Choreographers and Creative Technicians
- Critiques and Commentaries
- Signal Events: Carifesta, Overseas Tours, Morning of Movement and Music, Musical – Jamaica Calling – The School of Dance (Education & Training)
EPILOGUE: Beyond 45 and the Way Forward
Reviews
‘[The dance of the NDTC, like Caribbean Literature] passed through phases of scornful hostility, then a softening of attitudes conveyed by the news on international approval and curiosity; settling later into a more critical, native evaluation of the work under scrutiny. It has been a rough road of question and argument about social relevance and artistic standards. No Caribbean artist [like the Jamaica NDTC] has escaped this plague of historic self-doubt and cultural dependence.’
George Lamming
‘The road along which Mr Nettleford has travelled with his Company is not “The road to whiteness” and not along that other route, assimilation, but along the only true one, the anarchic authority of his vision…he is a true and cunning revolutionary, and an ordinary West Indian genius.’
Derek Walcott
‘The National Dance Theatre Company has grown up with independent Jamaica, and I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that the Company has become one of the artistic resources of our young nation…one must admire its righteous loyalty to Jamaican and Caribbean cultural forms, through which it has sought its major inspiration.’
Edward Seaga, founding Patron, NDTC and former Prime Minister of Jamaica
‘The Company has time and again afforded Jamaicans the stimulus of sharing the genuinely creative expressions of its artistic endeavours, with the attendant intellectual and spiritual enrichment and sheer pleasure and enjoyment which such experiences impart. Above all, it has through its choreography, created a mirror in which Jamaica can see the best in herself.’
Michael Manley, former Prime Minister, Jamaica
‘…It has been all over the world, with its drummers and singers as well as its dancers, and has built up a formidable reputation. Its patterns come from modern Jamaica itself, from its cultural traditional folklore, its reggae music and its Rastafarian religion, but includes Jamaica’s ethnic roots in Africa, with more than a nod to the brothers in the American south.’
Clive Barnes
‘This Company was born as Jamaica was re/born and has lived the stark sonorous destruction & renewal of the dream that the Caribbean has been involved in since 1962 since 1865 since 1834 since 1492. As such, it is the avatar and living monument to those countless voices millions dead who made their mark unmarked before this could be so. It has become the body voice: brief but enduring signatures in space: of those who footstepped, crouched, leapt or were hurled onto what becomes the stage and drama of this book: the record of a people’s cross & crossing: creative burden of colliding continents: reduced to necessary written word by this modestly masked “artistic director”, who has him-singly done as much as anyone in these “blue scapes, Greek there” to articulate the pride & pain & passion brought us here, and more that most has worked far more than most toward that sense of style: vibration not missilic dictat; that cycle circle capsule contraction & release, that polyrhythmic contraction we recognize as ours.’
Kamau Brathwaite, Foreword to Dance Jamaica… (1984)
