National Dance Theatre Company (NDTC) dancers in performance. - Contributed

The National Dance Theatre Company (NDTC) opens its 46th Season of Dance which runs from July 25 to August 24 and has eight new works with six new choreographers.

Clive Thompson's new offering, Raw Souls, joins masterworks such as Katrina and Kumina, which in addition to a new generation of choreographers and dancers, promise much excitement.

Veteran musician Marjorie Whylie's arrangements for well-known mento tunes and contemporary popular songs will again challenge the NDTC Singers to an integrated showpiece, Character Sketches 2, as well as their stand-alone renditions of two separate suites of songs.

New works

But the works that are expected to attract much attention are those of Marlon Simms (dance captain and soloist); Arsenio Andrade-Calderon (long-time principal and a talented creator); Chris Walker (recently appointed an assistant professor in dance at the University of Wisconsin); and Kevin Moore (who staged the movements for the last LTM pantomime).

Simms' Joyful Joyful, which had its tryout at the 2007 Easter Morning of Movement and Music, features principals Keita-Marie Chamberlain, Alicia Glasgow, Tamara Noel and Kevin Moore supported by the new recruit Maia Pereira and the rest of the Company.

An all-male ensemble work is one of two offerings by budding dance master Arsenio Andrade-Calderon, whose Out of Many, mounted last season, is rated as one of the finest works to appear in the NDTC repertoire. He will appear in Afi Somos as he will in his second work Intervalos, featuring Marlon Simms, Shakee Dobson, Tovah-Marie Bembridge, Stefanie Thomas and Christina Gonzales.

Kevin Moore's Celebration Courage experiments with pure movement imaging starbursts through the athleticism depicting, as he says, courage which fosters celebration. Chris Walker returns to contemporary popular Jamaican urban musical offerings and will mount two works Sen' Off, utilising the full company, and Troubled Water.

Sharing duties as dance captain with Simms, he has helped to remount the ancestral Kumina and will remount later in the season his own Variations A Ska. Other remounts will be the duet Millennial Beings choreographed by Simms which he performs in partnership with Mark Phinn.

Technical cast

Sound director, Tony Holness, and lighting designer, Rufus McDonald are busy preparing for the varied repertoire, while wardrobe mistress, Barbara Kaufmann, can be seen in rehearsals sorting out the many costumes that the dancers and singers will demand for wear.

Emerging master costume designer is associate director Barry Moncrieffe, former principal dancer and soloist and now a much acclaimed fashion designer. Tony Locke remains the stage manager, with the season benefiting from the continuity even while the world acclaimed dance-theatre ensemble renews itself.

The performances will be on Thursdays to Sundays at the Little Theatre, Tom Redcam Avenue, Kingston.