Rex Nettleford, Contributor
Jimmy Cliff performs at the 41st Montreux Jazz Festival at the Stravinski Hall in Montreux, Switzerland, on Saturday, July 21, 2007. The NDTC has paid extensive homage to Cliff. - Contributed
The use of reggae music by choreographers in the National Dance Theatre Company (NDTC) is as old as the music itself. The NDTC, which was founded in 1962 before the flowering of reggae, grew up, after all, with the music in its progress from ska through rocksteady to its present textured manifestations. This is either forgotten or genuinely not known.
In 1984, the NDTC Season of Dance presented Vibrations, utilising the music of Ya Ya, Gregory Isaacs, Papa Levi and the rhythms of reggae and Rasta brought together in a live orchestral arrangement by NDTC's musical director Marjorie Whylie.
Most of the earlier choreographic essays into reggae were to recorded music. In one case, an attempt to reproduce music by Toots Hibbert for the dance-work Backlash was given up on since as artistic director and choreographer I felt that the voice of Toots Hibbert himself was critical to the overall piece, as had been the voices of Jimmy Cliff and Bob Marley (to Tribute to Cliff and Court of Jah respectively), the two other reggae greats who have provided the NDTC choreographic impulse with primal energy.
forerunner of dancehall
Back in 1972, Tommy Pinnock created a work entitled Desperate Silences, drawing on the music of Burning Spear, largely to provide ambience for the piece which caught the anguish and dread reality of a Kingston ghetto. The dancers danced in the silences, allowing the reggae singers to tell their tales of desperation as links. Pinnock's city orientation stood out in stark contrast to the strong rural sensibility of the early NDTC choreographers.
During that same year, Sheila Barnett engaged an American Peace Corps volunteer, Bob Sinicrope, to compose music for her A Question of Balance. Sinicrope included a "reggae segment", having been influenced by the rising popularity of the music in the early 1970s.
Three years before the Pinnock and Barnett experiments, I had explored the "riddim" in All God's Children, using it for the downtown characters in the 1969 dance-work.
By 1973, reggae was in full swing and the NDTC was swinging with it. I took up the challenge with Street People, mixing Desmond Dekker's Israelites, admittedly from an earlier rocksteady era, with Ernie Smith's Ben Dung, then popular on the charts.
In the dance sequence, there was a forerunner of dancehall. Here, life followed art two decades later in the dance moves of real life dancehall as in Bujurama, a celebration of the dancehall prince Buju Banton. In 1974, it was Tribute to Cliff, a work dedicated to the genius of the star of The Harder They Come. The music which inspired the choreographer were Price of Peace, On My Life, Sitting in Limbo and the immortal Many Rivers To Cross.
In 1975, it was time to tackle both Toots and the Maytals and the inimitable Bob Marley. Backlash was the name of my work dealing with prison oppression and police brutality. Bam Bam started the work and Toot's Christmas Song ended it. Marley's Rebel Music, No Woman No Cry and So Jah Seh provided the score for Court of Jah.
Aficionados from the Marley camp felt that my choreographer lacked the muscularity of Marley's music and did not match the effective rootsiness of Backlash, done to the Maytals score. The controversy continued for sometime after, but the work - Court of Jah - developed in stature, winning international acclaim when the NDTC appeared at City Center in New York in 1984, and later when the short-lived Clive Thompson Dance Company, based in Staten Island, danced the work, which entered that group's repertoire, at the Lincoln Center in New York. The power and fame of Bob Marley and his music were part of that acclaim.
The next work to utilise reggae outright came in 1981 when I again turned to Marley's Work and Redemption Song, this time for the dance-satire, Rockstone Debate. Back in 1978 the dance-work, Elements, conceived and assembled by me, had a short solo segment created by Patsy Ricketts to the reggae rhythm.
In 1984, Vibrations had gone full stream into the rhythms, sounds and sensibility of the "reggae universe". The next big dance-work by the NDTC to utilise reggae itself was my Children of Mosiah. Again the work of Marley and Cliff dominated the piece, but the choreographer saw others like the Burning Spear, Peter Tosh and Mutabaruka also as the Children of Mosiah (meaning Marcus Mosiah Garvey). The occasion was the centenary of the great visionary's birth (1988). This was to inspire Cuban choreographer Eduardo Rivero-Walker to create Tribute in celebration of the music of reggae classicists, Marley and Cliff, and performed by the NDTC in its 1995 season of dance.
Dis Poem
The year 1988 also saw the creation of Dis Poem, utilising the dub poetry of Mutabaruka. The reggae-Rasta-riddim complex had expanded to full-blown dub poetry, which in 1987 inspired Tony Wilson to create a sequence to Mikey Smith's Roots for his work, Dance Jamaica.
Alongside dub poetry came dancehall, used by the NDTC from 1984 and further utilised by Bert Rose in his 1988 creation of Caribbean Canvas, while the Della Move, one of the spontaneous movement designs emerging from the sessions, found a place in Praise Songs (1991), as the Butterfly and the Bogle (a descendant of the traditional bruckins party) found replication in Interconnexions (1993). It was done to African music to emphasise the point of the roots from which such movement patterns come.
In 1995, Monika Lawrence, with the assistance of former NDTC principal Patsy Ricketts, (herself then specialising in the rasta-reggae-riddim genre of the art), turned to dancehall (reggae's offspring) for the urban segments of her dance, Liza, a rural-urban encounter much of it recalling Street People, Puncie and Vibrations before it.
In 1994, Arlene Richards scored an instant hit with Cocoon. It was seen by some to be influenced by the movement-patterns and 'riddim' of reggae, innovatively filtered through the artistic imagination of the choreographer to produce a dance-work of great originality and aesthetic power. Unlike so many others, her work was not a literal transportation from the streets to the stage.
In all this the NDTC Singers have long included suites of reggae songs in their repertoire, starting with Satta Massagana (1979), setting the pace for other choral groups like the University Singers whose rendition of No Woman No Cry never failed to do justice to the musical genius of Marley. In 1992, an arrangement of a suite of Bob Marley songs by Marjorie Whylie emerged, to be followed a year later with the songs from the Festival/Popular Song Contest dating back to 1963. Freddie McGregor has also been celebrated by the NDTC Singers.
The world of Rastafari has long been a 'source of energy' for NDTC choreographic work. In 1964 I, (after co-authoring the Report on Rastafari along with M.G. Smith and Roy Augier, colleagues from the UWI, in 1960) addressed the phenomenon of Rastafari, the source of 'Dread culture' in the prophetic Two Drums for Babylon, which was updated in 1980 with new music composed by Peter Ashbourne, who drew heavily on the developments in reggae by that time.
creative gifts
Ashbourne, however, brought to his score his own creative gifts of harmony and rhythm. He recorded the composition for the NDTC in Marley's Tuff Gong Studio in Kingston. The NDTC's seminal work now bears fruit in the efforts of most of the more recent dance troupes that have emerged on the Jamaican scene with mission statements that commit their energies to finding form and aesthetic weight out of the rich vibrancy of Jamaica's contemporary popular music and related movement designs.
The advent of my Cave's End in 2002 to Jimmy Cliff's rarely aired Journey of a Lifetime and Odyssey (2004) to Marley's music sung by the Brazilian Gilberto Gil were natural developments. So was Clive Thompson's Ode, created also in 2004 and danced to Marley's music orchestrated and performed by Prisoners of the System, an ensemble of Jamaican-Canadian instrumentalists.
