The Company Dance Theatre celebrates 25 years

Michael Reckord, Gleaner Writer

This weekend's presentation of The Company Dance Theatre's season of dance at The Little Theatre, Tom Redcam Avenue, St Andrew, is special. With it, The Company celebrates its 25th anniversary.

Audiences will see a different show on each night of the three-night season, artistic director Tony Wilson told me. The culminating performance on Sunday will be a renown Wilson creation, the full-length ballet Rose Hall, referring to the world-famous estate once ruled by the legendary 'White Witch, Annie Palmer'.

But even that work will be different. "Each time I remount Rose Hall, I revamp it," Wilson said, adding that he has changed some of the music in the second act "to make it more exciting", and also choreographed a solo for Steven Cornwall, who portrays overseer Robert.

Wilson also gave me a rundown on the other nights' programmes. Tonight features two other Wilson's dances, Colours (1900) and Calabash (2000). Of the latter work, Wilson, who generally shies away from Jamaican music, said, "I call this my creative Jamaican folk dance" as it features many dance styles. A solo, Sparrow, Michael Holgate's Creole Blooming and Barbara McDaniel's Session will also be staged tonight.

Tomorrow's programme includes Renee McDonald's Spectrum and The M Word, the latter a dance dedicated to the battle against cancer. The Arsenio Andrade solo Cartas al Desnudo, which was originally created for Samantha Chin Yee, will be performed by her 16-year-old sister, Lia.

Steven Cornwall's solo, Nature Boy, and Calabash round out the night's offerings. Of special interest, Wilson said, is the fact that McDaniel will lead six women from the Com-pany's original cohort in dancing the fourth movement of Calabash.

Asked to name the company's most significant change over its 25 years, Wilson replied, "the transformation of the young dancers". He is delighted in their growth from ingénues to company leaders and "stars".

Wilson also paid tribute to Prof Rex Nettleford, the late co-founder and artistic director of the National Dance Theatre Company (NDTC), of which Wilson was a member before forming his own company. When he is teaching and choreographing, Wilson said, "I keep hearing the Professor's voice. More and more, I have come to value being part of the NDTC and I'm happy I can pass on the knowledge I gained there and create something new."

young and in charge

Dancer-choreographer McDonald, who turned 24 years old just days ago, told me she started dancing with The Tony Wilson Dance School when she was eight and became a member of The Company Dance Theatre (the company within the school) when she was 14. Back then, she recalled, work within The Company (as compared to work in the school), was "intense". It clearly remains so as, from June, members of The Company rehearsed five days a week for the anniversary season.

"In the off-season, we're in class three days a week," McDonald said. "We rehearse three hours, usually from seven to 10 p.m."

Looking back over the years since she started dancing, McDonald said, "it's been an amazing journey. I remember when I had a tiny body and a big head and Mr Wilson trained me and moulded me. Even my choreography is influenced by Mr Wilson. I thank him and The Company for what I am today."

What she is today, apart from a Company member, is a first-year law student at the University of the West Indies (UWI). Her plan is to have a dual career in the disciplines, but couldn't say at this stage if she'd ever become as passionate about law as she is about dance.

Caribbean theatre symposium

Two weekends ago I took an all-too-brief, all-expenses paid trip to Paris. Among the exciting things I did was to climb half-way up the Eiffel Tower, from where I could see more than half the city

I didn't continue my climb to the top, which would have taken another 40 minutes, because of a scheduled meeting. It was in relation to the reason I had been invited to Paris - to attend a symposium on Caribbean theatre.

Paris-based actor and director Jean-Michel Martial of Guadeloupe organised the symposium as part of a larger project funded by the French Ministry of Culture to establish a repertory of Caribbean theatre texts. At the function, held in the beautiful Museum of the Petit-Palais, the first of 34 volumes of plays collected in the series, titled The Caribbean Theatre Repertoire, was launched.

Each volume will consist of a Caribbean play translated into the region's main languages. In the first volume is Simone Schwarz-Bart's Ton Beau Capitaine (Your Handsome Captain) in its original French, with translations in English, Creole, Spanish and Dutch.

Actress-director Dr Jean Small, who directed that play when she headed the Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts, Mona some years ago, was one of the presenters at the function. More than 20 other theatre practitioners from the Caribbean and scores of France-based ones were also invited.

The first volume contains an introduction to the project by Martial. In these two paragraphs, translated by a member of his organising team, Alvina Ruprecht, his passion for the project is evident.

"The multilingual edition of The Caribbean Theatre Repertoire definitely has a global symbolic function. It emphasises a new way of conceiving the world. We feel that this way of opening Caribbean expression to multiple languages becomes a way of opening the Caribbean people to their responsibility of enriching the world with their words, their languages and all the stories that are so much part of their creation. They can now draw their energy from all the forces that were silenced for so long by the voices that denied their existence over centuries."

"The Caribbean Theatre Repertoire brings us new playwrights and celebrates the history of these people through the experiences of those who live and build a Caribbean zone open to the world, a zone inspired by the desire to meet "the other" with respect and the acceptance of our differences, acknowledging the luck we had to live through new contacts and new growth. Such is the miracle of the Creole language, a language which is very much alive, a language born of the necessity to link individuals through the common stories of the people who inadvertently found themselves in the region."