Enthusiastic audience at NDTC’s 45th Easter concert

The National Dance Theatre Company’s (NDTC) Easter Sunday morning concert drew an enthusiastic response from the near-capacity audience at the Little Theatre on Tom Redcam Avenue in St Andrew. There was continual applause and cheering throughout the show, and as it ended, one delighted patron declared to The Gleaner, ”That was one of the best in years. Lots of new dancers.”

Asked for his reaction to the comment, NDTC Artistic Director Marlon D. Simms was a smiling diplomat. “We are happy to have a production featuring both new and seasoned dancers,” said Simms. “We try to balance the programme and give everybody an opportunity to not only showcase their talent, but participate in a special way.”

Mattu Perry, who was backstage with us at the time, is a relative newcomer. After only three years with the company, he is certainly participating in a special way — as both dancer and choreographer. On Sunday, he appeared in a number of pieces with the full company and was one of the lead dancers in the late Bert Rose’s 1997 dance ‘Steal Away’, along with long-time company stars Kerry-Ann Henry (who is also ballet mistress) and Mark Phinn.

Perry said his 2025 dance, ‘Clipped and Fallen’, was so well received that it attracted four additional dancers for Sunday’s staging, when it was performed by the full company. The dance, which Perry described as “a thematic work about the fall from [God’s] grace,” features an angel’s ‘fall’ and the consequential loss of its wings – this being symbolic of man’s fall.

At 6 a.m., as the house lights dimmed and the stage lights came up, a rare sight unfolded outside the theatre: the sun and moon in the sky. Preceded by a soft dawn light, the sun had edged up over the eastern Beverly Hills-Long Mountain range, while the cheese-yellow moon was floating high in the western sky. The unusual phenomenon was reflected as creativity and diversity in a number of items staged in the concert. Comprising dance, song and the spoken word, it lasted just over an hour and 20 minutes.

That same sense of invention and range was evident in the opening piece, ‘Opening Hymn’, with numbers alone telling one aspect of the story. The choreographer, Simms, worked with 26 dancers; the arranger and NDTC Musical Director Dr Kathy Brown worked on a hymn written in 1680 by Joachim Neander, based on Psalm 103, and translated into English by Catherine Winkworth in 1863. As director, Brown worked with 14 singers and seven musicians, whose instruments were drums, keyboard and two types of guitars.

The other aspect was qualitative: the work showed that the dancers, singers and musicians were in top form. They promised the audience a splendid show.

An excerpt from Troy Powell’s ‘Unscathed’ (2015) followed, the company’s graceful, flowing moves being in sharp contrast to their bouncy energy in the first item. The third piece, Simms’ ‘Were You There’, which shifted the earlier joyful mood to poignantly address Jesus’ crucifixion, involved dancers moving around a set of singers at centre stage.

Both mood and genre changed for the fourth item, with one of Jamaica’s best-known voices, Fae Ellington, reading a poem, And the Garden Answered. It focuses on Jesus’ resurrection and is full of flower imagery. The next dance, ‘Bloom on Earth as it is in Heaven’ (2025), by Avree Walker, assisted by Radnell Marin-Pedraza, also featured flowers – but on the floral costumes of the female dancers.

With her soulful singing of the Negro Spiritual Fix Me, Carolyn Reid-Cameron, standing centre stage, Bible in hand, pleaded to God with such intensity that she got the loudest applause up to that time. ‘Clipped and Fallen’ was followed by the singers’ sincere delivery of O Sacred Head Now Wounded. It would have benefited from audience participation, but the words of the hymn were not present in the printed programme handed out earlier in the lobby.

Had this not been the NDTC’s 45th annual Morning of Movement and Music – a concert that runs without pause at a breathtaking pace – that eighth item would have marked the halfway point. Instead, the 16-item production moved swiftly onward, with the solemn Steal Away and the singers’ joyous Brown-arranged Praise Medley staged before the morning’s two new dances were premiered.

Dance Captain Paul Newman’s ‘Threads of Becoming’ is an energetic, celebratory piece performed to the well-known song of gratitude It Is Well With My Soul. Simms’ ‘Joined by Faith’ is also a celebration, with a big difference being that Newman has his six dancers spending a lot of time in the air – with leaps and lifts – while Simms’ two female dancers generally sweep around the stage in their long white dresses.

The upbeat mood continued until the end of the concert – with the singers performing O Happy Day, the dancers performing an excerpt from Rex Nettleford’s ‘Apocalypse’ (2009), and everyone participating in the Marjorie Whylie arrangement of The Lord’s Prayer and Noel Dexter’s version of Psalm 150 for Nettleford’s choreography.

Our spirits were as bright as the sunshine outside when we left the theatre at around 7:30 a.m.

entertainment@gleanerjm.com