Remembering Rex
Nettleford, the
guardian of our
crossroads
 Honor Ford-Smith
teaches in the
Faculty of
Environmental
Studies at York
University. She
worked in the
Caribbean women’s
movement, primarily
through her
involvement in
collaborative theatre in Jamaica.
The first time I met
Rex Nettleford was
when he came to our
Kingston High School
in 1968 around the
time of the Rodney
uprising to speak to
our 6th form about
Black Power. I don’t
remember what he
said because I
didn’t understand it.
His vocabulary
consisted mainly of
words I had never
heard before and his
utterances bounced
off my 16 year old
brain before I could
catch hold of them
and translate them
into plain English.
But I remember
vividly how his
presence filled our
Presbyterian
classroom and how
his pink shirt
glowed against his
obsidian skin. I
remember the
elegance of his
postures and the
hand that moved back
and forth, back and
forth with his words.
I mention this not
to dramatize my
pubescent interest
in bodies, though
that was likely a
factor, but because
what remains with me
is what he performed
in that still-colonial
space that is now
just a memory. Rex’s
body and the
effortlessness of
his speech,
delivered without
notes and punctuated
with his always
moving forearm, was
itself a lesson. It
was a lesson in what
he called the inward
“reach” a concept so
often seen in his
choreography, a
movement embodying
what you yearned
for, something not
yet brought into
being. It was about
imagining us
ourselves as we
might be, using what
we had to hand.
That imagined
community was the
community of nation
and he brought it
into being by
choreographing and
performing it with
others. You knew
that this community
had come into being
when you rose at the
end of the NDTC
performance of
Kumina or Gerrebenta
or Pukkumina to move
with the drums and
dancers, to clap
until your hands
were sore and the
lights faded. You
knew it when Patsy
Ricketts and Barry
Moncreiff moved in
effortless unison to
Jimmy Cliff’s Many
Rivers to Cross in
Tribute to Cliff or
when Yvonne DaCosta
or Sheila Barnett or
Arlene Richards
danced their solos.
All this sounds a
simple enough
insight but it was
actually one of
Rex’s most complex
contributions,
arising from his
careful negotiation
of the realms of the
critical and the
artistic. As opposed
to the much
contested but still
prevalent separation
of mind and body in
Western knowledge (I
think therefore I am),
I read Rex’s work as
being rooted in the
body, community and
movement and in so
doing proposed a way
around the impasse
of the Cartesian
binary which has
been so central to
modern Imperial
thought. For him,
knowledge could not
be confined to the
verbal or to the
archival. The body
and its actions were
a key site of
postcolonial
struggle and a
source of
emancipatory
knowledge. The
origins of this idea
were generated in
the period of
plantation slavery.
which he theorized
as the moment when
the dance became a
primary instrument
of survival that
furthered cultural
resistance. As he
argued in 1985:
First, it (dance) is
a skill that depends
on the physical and
mental capacities of
the survivor. One's
body belongs only to
oneself, despite the
laws governing
chattel slavery in
the English-speaking
Caribbean, which
until 1834 allowed a
person to be the "property"
of another. Second,
the language by
which the body
expresses itself
does not have to be
anyone else's
language, least of
all the master's;
even when there are
borrowings, which
are inescapable in a
multi-cultural
environment, they
can be given shape
and form on the
borrower's own terms.
These strategies are
crucial in a
situation of
pervasive dependency,
where all influences
are dictated by the
overlord ... A hold
on any activity
beyond the control
of a cynical power
is a valuable weapon
of cultural
self-defence. The
art of dance,
comprising the
dancer's own body
movements informed
by his own spiritual
and emotional states
is such a weapon.
This “valuable
weapon of self
defense” is the
knowing body, an
idea which as he
lays it out, is
complex. It comes
into being as a
result of the
coercive
institutions, and
violence of the
“overlord” but it is
also sustained by
what he called “the
worship of forbidden
but persistent gods
and the
configuration of the
world beyond the
master’s grip.”
This maverick
existence at the
threshold or
crossroads of sacred
and secular power,
at the boundary of
imperial knowledge,
is critical to his
ideas about what
Caribbean culture
and identity can be.
His name for this
shifting and
mercurial creative
spirit was cultural
marronage and this
was the conceptual
framework for his
artistic work.
Drawing on the work
of anthropologist
Richard Price,
Nettleford theorized
the dance as a
moving cultural
reserve, a space
that operated in
covert political
ways through
secrecy, cunning and
fugitive
sensibilities. The
term cultural
marronage is a
metaphor that draws
on the movement of
the maroons who
through displacement
and/or flight away
from slavery,
managed to both
resist the colonial
order and partially
construct another.
From their place in
the hills, the
maroons raided the
plantation and
fought the
colonizers. In
Nettleford’s
rendering, this was
not an act of
authentic warriors
or a romance of
rebellion, it was
strategy and when
translated into
dance it would bring
a safe community
into being from
which other
challenges to the
hierarchical order
could be mounted.
The dance was an
existential space
called home as much
as it was the
process of finding a
way home. We see
this over and over
again in his
choreography in
which the dancers
move diagonally
across the stage in
alternating waves
entering and
exiting, overlapping
and becoming visible
and then
disappearing
offstage only to
return over and over
again till finally
the entire company
is present on stage
in the finale.
Movement in
community is the
place of being and
becoming. It is a
path to knowledge
and it is the basis
on which communities
of resistance can
give rise to new
subjects. Bodies can
move back and forth
both within and
outside the dominant
order of knowledge,
slipping away from
the grasp of the
verbal language and
the written
knowledge of the
colonizers, shaking
off the violence of
their gaze. Dancers
move in the spaces
between words and in
this space act to
generate new ways of
self-identification.
Within this language
of action bring new
human subjects into
being. Once these
come into existence,
they can demand and
win recognition.
Rex’s commitment to
imagining national
community in
performance and
finding the strategy
to bring it into
being was
accompanied by a
stunning record of
scholarly
publications which
together constitute
a philosophy of
Caribbean nation.
Despite being part
of the generation
coming to voice
precisely at the
moment of political
independence he
avoided the banal
and formulaic
modernism of much of
development studies.
In spite of his
position in academic
and institutional
management, he never
succumbed to the
manipulative
languages of
management and human
resources and he was
never seduced by
economic or
political
reductionism. His
cultural work was
characterized by its
embrace of
complexity and
contradiction, and
the recognition that
ambivalence could be
a productive force,
because culture
itself is almost
always about
negotiating
contradictory
forces.
In his early work he
focused on
translating embodied
and oral knowledge
into written and
later visual forms
and from there into
theoretical and
institutional spaces
where both students
and citizens could
learn about them and
where they could
find the space to
try out using and
transforming them.
Some examples of
this work of
inventorying,
documenting and
interpreting include
the authoritative
report on the
Rastafari Movement
in Kingston Jamaica
which he coauthored
with Augier and MG
Smith in 1960.
Jamaica Labrish the
first complete
anthology of Louise
Bennett’s poems
appeared in 1966
edited and
introduced by him
and was an important
first step toward
the legitimizng of
Bennett as a writer
performer who mixed
oral and written
form of English and
Jamaican. But it was
his Mirror Mirror:
identity race and
protest in Jamaica
(1970) which marked
him as writer who
could tackle the
complexity of race
and cultural
identity when the
subject was still
taboo.
This ability to
embrace conflicting
forces and to make
them generative of
something new
explains why I think
of him as one
embodiment of the
archetypal Papa
Legba, the guardian
of the crossroads. I
invoke the figure of
Legba because it is
he who is able to
opens a space within
which reasoning,
understanding and
exchange can take
place across
difference and
across the borders
of time and space.
He is simultaneously
male and female,
black and white,
past and present,
old and young, lame
and potent. As a
guardian of
intersections and
junctions, Rex
Nettleford worked to
create a network
that brought
together an amazing
range of people from
diverse persuasions
and various
institutional
spaces. This
interdisciplinarity
and cross
fertilization has
touched all the
peoples of the
region without their
even knowing. The
University of the
West Indies, that
National Dance
Theatre Company, the
Edna Manley College,
the Little Theatre
Movement of Jamaica,
the Institute of
Jamaica are just
some of those
institutions he
served. He worked so
that they would
serve the formation
of community across
the crevasse of
class, colour and
shade, education and
gender that so
divide the region.
Within each of these
institutional spaces
he encouraged and
sustained an
incredible mix of
people and
disciplines such as
Trade unions and
dance, writing,
anthropology and
education, cultural
management and
social welfare.
As a young actress
and teacher of drama
I saw Rex most often
in the 1970s when I
worked as a teacher
at the Edna Manley
College of the
Visual and
Performing Arts
(then called the
Cultural Training
Centre). He had
created the
conceptual brief for
the schools of art,
dance and drama in
the 1970s. He
conceptualized the
curriculum of the
college to produce
what he called a
cultural agent,
someone who was not
a conventional
teacher but rather
someone who could
practice their art,
talk about it and
teach it. This
cultural agent was
the antithesis of
the western idea of
the individualized
artist. It was an
artist responsive
and responsible to
the community they
served and named,
who would develop,
discuss and teach
ideas about what it
meant to be a
Caribbean person by
drawing from popular
forms of all kinds,
interpreting,
enacting and
representing them in
communities,
theatres, cultural
centres, galleries,
studios and schools.
As chairman of the
Council of the
Institute of Jamaica
along with novelist
Neville Dawes, he
helped to make sure
that the research
needed to support
the work of these
folks was happening.
Researchers, dancers
and musicians like
Cheryl Ryman,
Beverly Alleyne,
Joyce Campbell,
Marjorie Whylie
observed and
recorded traditional
dances and spoken
language from
districts around the
country. They
documented and
discussed what they
found often tracing
the African or Asian
origins of these
forms to make these
visible where before
the journey they had
taken to the region
had been denied and
denigrated. These
were then
imaginatively
transposed to the
classroom. They
found their way on
to urban stages in
the performances of
the National Dance
Theatre whose
dancers effectively
transposed the
regional form into
national cultural
capital. The
traditional
movements were
organized into dance
and music curricula
and became
recognizable and
familiar to
Caribbean people
through the theatre
and through national
festivals. The
Kumina rhythms for
example which forty
years ago was
particular to one
part of Jamaica and
in danger of dying
is now commonly
played throughout
the region and is
clearly identifiable
to many as a
Jamaican rhythms.
All this work was
just one part of
what Rex did. It was
just one piece of
teaching the meaning
of community and
citizenship. Within
this vocabulary
several generations
learned new forms of
identification. It
cannot have been
easy to do all this.
To move from his
rural working class
origins to what was
then an elite
colonial boarding
school and then on
to Oxford, to learn
to combine art and
social critique, to
work across
disciplines and to
take on enormous
leadership and
administrative
responsibility over
and over again, not
to mention the sheer
physical work of
running a large
dance company and
attending frequent
rehearsals. That he
did not do it alone,
that he created and
inspired teamwork
and volunteerism
among his colleagues
and fellow artists
is testimony to what
was possible with
strong leadership in
the face of limited
resources. Rex’
endurance over a
period of fifty
years gave the
cultural
institutions he led
a reassuring
stability. He
engendered a filial
relationship with
many young
performers, artists
and scholars.
Obviously we didn’t
always agree with
him. Many loudly
criticized but most
found in him a
teacher who
challenged and
motivated folks to
do more than they
thought they could,
an artist and
scholar of enormous
integrity and
optimism who was
never afraid to fail
or to keep going, a
colleague with whom
we could disagree
and a man who fought
fiercely for the
institutions he
served. He learned
from his students
and who opened doors
and walked with you
across thresholds.
In the exchange of
emails after news of
his death spread
last week a friend
wrote “Who will
remind us to dance,
who will force us to
ask hard questions
about ourselves, who
will make us smile
about the ways in
which we render
"smaddification"
upon each other?”
Who will indeed?
Will you?
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Le pouvoir
et le
président de
la
République
en
particulier
sont la
cible des
protestations
sur l'île.
Crédits
photo : AFP |
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