This kind of work is truly difficult and requires varying degrees of alignment and initiation within the body. When moving in a balletic form, the dancer must pay attention to maintaining an erect spine and defying the laws of gravity to keep a sense of airiness within the movement as they seemingly levitate across the stage… To then shift thirty seconds later into an African folk dance which requires the dancer to stay grounded (giving into gravity’s tendency to make the body feel heavy), and extremely rhythmic is no small feat.

These dances incorporated complementary and compatible modern and ballet sequences. Classical ballet served as a model since the national folk dances of Europe were absorbed by dancers in Jamaica during colonialism. NDTC Co-Founder Rex Nettleford found ballet to be beneficial (once stripped of its ethnocentric prejudices) because of ballet technique’s ability to strengthen limbs, especially feet and legs; aid in body alignment, and to facilitate stretches and extensions.

A critic once wrote that the work the company “has done is a distillation of the Antillean soul (this three-layered psyche born from the Amerindian, the African Slave, and the European) of such rightness that all of us born in the Caribbean recognize as part of our most intimate self.”

African and Caribbean idioms are used often within the company’s repertory. The stories of national figures and the revisiting of traditional songs and stories make this company’s aesthetic uniquely Jamaican. NDTC experiments with aspects of both modern dance techniques and European classical ballet principles that were attributed to the process of re-creation and revitalization. The hope was that the dancers would retain the power of certain movements that would evoke the hidden realities of contemporary Jamaican and Caribbean life. Their conceptual dances were based on ancestral rituals and recreational dances.

Rex Nettleford and the dancers weren’t substantially funded when they formed their dance collective. The dancers Nettleford worked with weren’t compensated for some years other than through the exchange of ideas and the fulfillment of watching their work come together. The studios they shared flowed with people who showed up with various levels of technique and commitment. Anyone could leave at any given time, even when they might have been pushed to their respective limits. In order to see it through, those dancers pulled productive energy directly from their understanding of the hundreds of thousands of agreements humans make with each other based on, as Nettleford says, “common sense and the knowledge of people and the appreciation for each other”. The sacrifices they gave were in the name of Jamaica’s nationalistic identity.