'Ancestral Images', choreographed by Clive Thompson, in an NDTC performance at BCBC, New York. - Contributed MEMBERS OF the National Dance Theatre Company (NDTC), returned to Jamaica on Monday, after playing to 8,000 schoolchildren in the Caribbean Diaspora and two capacity-filled adult performances last weekend in the Whitman Theatre, Brooklyn Centre for the Performing Arts.
Thousands braved the inclement weather last Saturday night and left the theatre singing praises for the NDTC. As artist-in-residence at Brooklyn College, the NDTC has performed at the Brooklyn Centre every other year since the early 1980s. The NDTC dancers and singers were greeted with shouts of 'bravo' and prolonged applause after many items.
In its performances, the NDTC paid tribute to the African Presence In The Americas. Choreographers Arlene Richards and Clive Thompson presented Sacred Ground and Ancestral Images respectively, each celebrating the music and dance of Blacks in the United States. Rex Nettleford's newest work, Brazilian Ode, took the audience to Brazil, which boasts the largest population of African descendants in the world, while his reggae/dancehall-based Bujurama, done to the music of Buju Banton ,and the ancestral Kumina, won their accustomed applause.
The New York audiences rose to their feet at the end of each performance of Kumina.
Trinidad and the Eastern Caribbean had their place in the varied repertoire with Ritual of the Sunrise featuring calypsonian David Rudder's famous composition High Mas, while the Yoruba-derived culture of Cuba found expression in Arsenio Andrade's Congo Laye. Marjorie Whylie's arrangements of two suites of reggae songs and one set of traditional Jamaican dancing tunes sung by the NDTC Singers attracted enthusiastic audience response, as did their work in Kumina.
Identity, choreographed by Monika Lawrence, and Side By Side, created by Arlene Richards, both in the contemporary modernesque mode, confirmed the diversity and versatility of the Jamaican ensemble of dancers, singers, musicians and creative technicians. This was highlighted by both Barbara Requa, founding member and a choreographer with the Company who hosted the children's performances, and by Professor Rex Nettleford in his speech to a large group of attendees at a post-performance reception comprising many dignitaries and their friends.
The audiences were at different times headed by the Jamaican Consul-General Dr. Basil Bryan, Dr. and Mrs. Karl-Rodney of the Carib News, a co-sponsor of the event, Ambassador Patricia Durrant, Jamaica's Permanent Representative to the UN and former Jamaican Ambassador Keith Johnson, the Mighty Sparrow (Francisco Slinger), and Ms. Judith Jameson the renowned dancer and artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre.
