THE National Dance Theatre Company (NDTC) artist-in-residence at the Brooklyn Centre for the Performing Arts returns to New York this week committed to “renewal and continuity”, the mode in which the company of over four decades is now working. Performances on March 6 and 7 at Walt Whitman Hall will pay tribute to their founder, artistic director and principal choreographer, Professor Rex Nettleford, former Rhodes Scholar and Professor Emeritus of the University of the West Indies, who died on February 2.

From a feast of newly choreographed works mounted during the NDTC’s last Season of Dance, will come such pieces as Nettleford’s folk romp, Sly Mongoose-Character Sketches, and his last ballet, Apocalypse, Cuban-born Arsenio Andrade’s As Somos and Redemption Rite choreographed by dance captain and principal dancer, Marlon Simms. Vignettes of Life, choreographed by Clive Thompson, an alumnus of both the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre and the Martha Graham Dance Company, and Incantation by the visionary Haitian choreographer, Jeanguy Saintus will also be featured.

Nettleford viewed the trend-setting company as always trying to break new ground while remaining culturally accessible. He felt that this development reflects what is happening not only in Caribbean society but in the wider world where the third millennium is demanding of everyone greater texture and a sensibility which takes into account the reality of change and diversity.

The NDTC reflects this exploring and experimenting without losing hold of its ancestral rootedness. Thus, Apocalypse explores the anguish and the hope of contemporary Caribbean life using the traditional ritual of Zion revivalism to restore hope where despair is threatened, and Incantation draws on Haitian traditional lore in modernesque designs. Marlon Simms, in his Redemption Rite examines traditional practices which fuel contemporary forms of expressions and provide a sense of empowerment, identity and a definite link to an important heritage.

The NDTC Singers under the direction of musical director, Marjorie Whylie, will accompany the dancers in Apocalypse and Sly Mongoose.

Such is the NDTC’s orientation that, at its last visit to Brooklyn, it prompted Yuriko, American dancer and choreographer acclaimed for her work with the Martha Graham Dance Company, to express gratitude to the Jamaican dance company for bringing to her the “gift of soul”.