Stella Maris premieres The Potter in tribute to Rex Nettleford
WHEN the 17th Annual Season of Dance of the Stella Maris Dance Ensemble opens at the Little Theatre on Friday, October 8, the Ensemble will debut two new works, including The Potter — choreographed by artistic director MoniKa Lawrence and ballet mistress Patsy Ricketts, in honour of the late Professor Rex Nettleford.
According to Lawrence, The Potter, a piece commissioned by the Jamaica National Building Society, will pay tribute to the memory of an artiste who constantly demonstrated “his genius in manipulating movement.” Principal dancer, Gavin Hart, will be the soloist in the piece.
Lawrence also disclosed that the season, as a whole, will be dedicated to the outstanding dance pioneer and founder of the National Dance Theatre Company (NDTC). This means that the Stella Maris Dance Ensemble will be performing not only The Potter but also two of Nettleford’s seminal works, Tribute to Cliff and Dis Poem.
“Nettleford entrusted those two works to the Ensemble while he was alive and we are very proud of the fact that our Ensemble is the only company, apart from the NDTC, to which he gave his works for performance purposes. We believe he felt that our Ensemble would do them justice and we will, therefore, honour him by pulling out all the stops in our performance of the pieces,” Lawrence said.
Audiences will be in for an additional treat as Abeldo “Tokie” Gonzales, the outstanding Cuban dancer who Nettleford recruited into the NDTC many years ago, will be returning to the stage for the first time in seven years to dance a duet with Stella Maris Dance Ensemble principal dancer, Monique Spence. The duo will be performing the Many Rivers to Cross segment of Tribute to Cliff — a duet which has been performed in the past by outstanding NDTC leads such as Barry Moncrieffe, Patsy Ricketts and Melanie Graham.
In fact, “Tokie” Gonzales is the architect of the season’s second new work. His offering on this occasion will be Supernova and audiences can look forward to another work that will be both delightfully different and entertaining.
The repertoire for the Ensemble’s 2010 Season will be completed by two additional JNBS-sponsored works: The Staff and the Cross, which had its premier in 2009, and Liza – the Ensemble’s rib-tickling, seminal work, which has often been compared favourably to Alvin Haley’s Revelations and Nettleford’s Kumina.
The season will actually begin on Thursday, October 7, when the Ensemble will mount a special performance for children drawn from children’s homes and places of safety across the island.