National Dance Theatre Company (NDTC) founding member Pansy Hassan died in the University Hospital on New Year’s Day after a very brief illness.

Hassan, who along with 16 other dancers, singers and creative technicians formed the NDTC in 1962, won international acclaim for her role as the Queen in the world-renown company’s Kumina.

Last year, during the NDTC Season at Kingston’s Little Theatre, Hassan came out of retirement to dance the role she had danced since 1971, opposite artistic director Rex Nettleford who choreographed the piece.

Kumina became the most frequently performed work in the diverse wide-ranging repertoire of the NDTC.

“She was an invaluable mentor to the new-generation dancers who now comprise the Company, along with newer recruits among the singers and musicians,” the NDTC said of Hassan in a statement yesterday. “She will therefore be a real loss at this time to the Company, which is now in the mode of renewal and continuity.”

Hassan was a featured dancer in other works such as Gerrehbenta, The Crossing and Court of Jah.

Yesterday, the NDTC described Hassan as “faithful” to its “system of creating a vocabulary, technique and style”, noting that she first trained with the Faye Simpson School of Ballet and danced in the LTM pantomimes as well as in the historic Sun Over the West Indies show mounted at Howard University, Washington, D C to inaugurate the Cramton Auditorium in 1961.

“She was known for her unreserved commitment to the shaping of a truly “classic” expression of Jamaican dance-theatre,” the Company said, adding that she toured with the NDTC all over the world, from Australia and the Soviet Union, Finland and Germany to Canada and the USA, as well as Costa Rica, Cuba, Venezuela, Panama, Grenada, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Barbados and St Kitts.

“In more recent years she served as special assistant to the artistic director, as well as costume co-ordinator, working in close association with veteran wardrobe mistress Barbara Kaufman,” the NDTC statement said. “She also assisted Joyce Campbell, another NDTC founding member, with adjudication of the dance competitions of the JCDC and conducted workshops on Jonkonnu masking and the making of dolls depicting characters from Jamaican folk rituals in the School of Dance (Edna Manley College).”

Hassan is survived by daughters Tanya Rae Hume and Staci-Lee Fowles, her two sons-in-law and three grandchildren.