NDTC’s Powerful Program of Dance November 4th, 2014, Sony Centre, Toronto

The National Dance Theatre Company (NDTC) of Jamaica will cement its place as the Caribbean’s premier dance company on Nov. 4 at the Sony Centre for the Performing Arts.
 
This single-night performance will feature standout performances from NDTC’s repertoire, built on dance and shored up by remarkable music, costume and choreography. The Toronto audience will be favoured with a historical master class in dance, part retrospective, part reveal and part ode. This tour de force marks the closing of its stellar 52nd season.
 
The evening will highlight the much-anticipated Tribute to Rex. The late Ralston Milton “Rex” Nettleford, OM, FIJ, OCC, was the company’s co-founder, a public intellectual, an activist and a global citizen who died in 2010. The Toronto gathering will also feature the company’s seminal work, a program to include the Súlkari (1980), an elaborate, Yoruba-inspired “dance of exaltation.” This introspective of the ever complicated male-female relationship is a fusion of artistic forms choreographed by Eduardo Rivero-Walker, featuring Marlon Simms, now NDTCs associate artistic director.  
 
Súlkari is accompanied by the bold, uber-contemporary ,Urban Fissuregram to include the S¨elease know or should know who he is?e and choreography.?] Urban Fissure (2004), featuring the music of the legendary Bob Marley, Eryka Badu and a Rastaman Chant with Busta Rhymes. In the 2010 work Minutes and Seconds, the stealth of choreographers Kerry-Ann Henry and Momo Sanno is a reminder that life, though complicated, demands respect and reflection for the “simple yet powerful things God has created.” And for the company’s devotees, the much lauded Nettleford masterpiece, Dialogue For Three (1963)—a true feminist libretto, and tense tale of three—is a classic tutorial in male struggle and helplessness “in the face of female force.”
 
Artistic director, visionary and technician artist Barry Moncrieffe says, “The season promises to be a rewarding and uplifting experience for audience members.”  Moncrieffe, committed to legacy building, is creatively governed by the company’s core values of “exploration, experimentation, renewal and continuity,” a formula that has made NDTC ” Alvin Ailey’s Diasporic twin and a revolutionary creative force in modern dance.”
 
Tickets are $50-200 and are available at Ticketmaster and the Sony Centre Box Office.