Marjorie Whylie and the NDTC, (Part 2)

Michael Reckord, Gleaner Writer

Last week, For the Reckord looked at Marjorie Whylie's early days with the National Dance Theatre Company (NDTC). Today, the two-part series concludes with a look at her composition process.

Recently retired from the twin posts of National Dance Theatre Company (NDTC) musical director and leader of the NDTC Singers, Marjorie Whylie remains on the NDTC management committee. She also continues to hold a special place in the hearts of many in the Company.

One of her admirers is choreo-grapher Clive Thompson. His response to my questions about Whylie's abilities as a composer was almost rhapsodic. He was speaking about the music she composed for two of his dances, 'Black Widow' (about the mating habits of the praying mantis) and 'Journeys Beyond Survival' (about the spiritual lives of Nelson Mandela and the late Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr). Words and phrases like "beautiful piece ... which brought tears to my eyes", "versatile", "a beautiful love duet" and "sheer genius" kept popping up.

The composition that moved him to tears was the one for the King segment. Thompson proclaimed Whylie versatile not only because she was able to write music conveying three very different atmospheres for the three men in Journeys, but because for Black Widow, he asked Whylie for music with "an eerie, out-of-this-world sound ... with an underlying heartbeat". And he got it. Thompson's conclusion was "she is a great educator and researcher".

challenges

Thompson's requests of Whylie touch on an aspect of her work that she elaborated on in her correspondence with me - the challenges of composing original music for choreographers of the NDTC's annual dance seasons. She composed for five of them, including Thompson, but sees original composition becoming a thing of the past.

"The culture is shifting," she says, "as few of the new choreographers are prepared to go through the longer process of creating with a partner, opting [instead] for canned music." She recalled that each choreographer had a different approach to obtaining the required music and "the process usually moved forward as dictated by the working method of each choreographer."

Sheila Barnett, the deceased former director of the School of Music, would start with a written scenario and, in classes, would explore movement patterns. Whylie would sketch rhythms and melodic lines to support what was appearing and often move beyond what had already been covered. That would lead Barnett to choreograph on the sequences that Whylie had created. "It was," Whylie said, "a hand-in-glove exercise."

Bert Rose handed Whylie a working tape. "Then," states the composer, "I would listen, observe and use the kinds of melodic contours suggested by the recorded collage, and the texture, rhythm and types of harmonic progressions, coming up with an original score which fit in with the movement. Another kind of hand in glove."

She continued: "Thompson presented a completed work, which I then observed, noting counts, sequences of bars, how the body was being used, and returned with completed music that worked to everyone's satisfaction."

NDTC artistic director and chief choreographer Rex Nettleford "used vocables, handclapping and expressed texture through elongated vowels, etc" in what Whylie saw as "perhaps the ultimate hand-in-glove" collaboration. "Sometimes," she opined, "he should have been listed as co-composer. "

It was with Nettleford's last work, Apocalypse, that Whylie faced her greatest challenge. "I was given a bed of dancehall rhythms over which I had to compose, with the exception of the final sequences which were kept in their entirety, with the singers and musicians operating on top of the full recording. The other six scenes required me to compose, expressing mood, atmosphere and rhythms while giving obeisance to the integrity of the dancehall 'riddim' tracks."

Some of Whylie's original compositions are Shadows, Ni Women Of Destiny, I Not I and Mountain Women (for Barnett), Thursday's Child (for Rose), Cantos (for Neville Black) and Litany, Elements, Apocalypse and sections of Backlash and Rockstone Debate (all for Nettleford).

In addition, for his dances, she worked with Nettleford on many arrangements of traditional material. These featured original rhythms, interludes and transitional musical links.

The very popular annual Easter Sunday Morning of Movement and Music, Whylie said, began with the passing of Joyce Lalor, the original leader of the NDTC Singers. The most recent staging was the first major NDTC show since Whylie's retirement. Now a tradition of 32 years, it was originally meant to be a one-off presentation in tribute to Lalor. Incidentally, at about the time it started, Whylie revealed, the Singers "were reined in by Nettleford (and) were often told 'be with us', so the performances without the dancers became fewer and fewer".

Becoming specific about the role of the Singers, Whylie stated: "The Singers have been used as members of the orchestra (referred to then by the artistic director as a choral orchestra), filling out the orchestration with chants, humming, almost percussive sounds, and been further challenged to sing vocables and in African languages and dialects as the focus of inspiration often shifted to the 'Motherland'."

She mentioned in particular Missa Criolla, which received a standing ovation in Venezuela when sung in the original Spanish and with the Argentinian rhythms on drums, percussion and guitar.

She summed up the Singers as "definitely a force within the Company", adding "the programming that has developed over the years through an artistic partnership between Nettleford and myself accounts for the uniqueness of the NDTC experience".