BERYL McBURNIE

1914-2000

 

RELENTLESS CHARM AND ENERGY

JUDY RAYMOND REVIEWS THE LIFE OF McBURNIE - ARTIST, DANCER, DRAMATIST…A PRESIDING GENIUS

 

Sunday Guardian

April 2, 2000

Page 15

 

Fifty-two years after she founded the Little Carib Theatre, Beryl McBurnie's name still figures large in the consciousness of Trinidadians as a pioneer in the preservation and appreciation of local art forms.

 

McBurnie, who died on March 30, was in her eighties.  She was a dancer and choreographer who influenced and inspired dancers for decades.  Her example led Rex Nettleford to found the Jamaica National Dance Theatre Company, which has a world-class reputation, and in 1978 she was one of three women pioneers in black dance to receive special tributes from the Alvin Ailey dance Company of New York.

 

But she also encouraged local musicians.  Andre Tanker, whose music draws on folk traditions, recalls that it was at the Little Carib that he first heard master drummer and Orisa priest Andrew Beddoe and began to understand the African roots of local music.

 

McBurnie was the first person to put a steelband on a stage - Invaders, who came around the corner from their Tragarete Road panyard to play at the opening of her theatre.  In those days steelbands were considered disreputable good-for-nothings, not real musicians, but McBurnie, herself a natural rebel, was undeterred.

 

Her theatre was the mas camp of Peter Minshall's first Carnival band, Zodiac, in 1978.

                                                  

The Little Carib and the work she did there inspired theatre practitioners to set up 'little theatres' throughout the Caribbean.  And it was at the Little Carib that Derek Walcott founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959.  As a performer, McBurnie could have been an international star.  She danced professionally in the US in the 1940s, under the stage name of "La Belle Rosette".  A New York reviewer wrote in 1942: "Rosette combined her abilities as dancer, interpretive artist and comedienne to great advantage.  A year from now she'll probably be one of Broadway's great stars.  She is different, definitely different."

 

But a year later McBurnie was back in Trinidad for good.  She gave up the bright lights, the fame and the money, to become a pioneer in the art she loved, and a mentor to countless others.

 

McBurnie was convinced that dance was the most significant West Indian art form, since it contained the greatest variety of raw material.

 

"The question is," she asked in a lecture any years later, "are we prepared to accept what is originally ours, and not be afraid because it is simple and given to cottons and not silk?  Or are we afraid because most of the vital expression of our folk material is of African origin?"

 

When she began, local dance was in danger of disappearing.  It was thought primitive, insignificant.  It wasn't respectable.  The folk dances McBurnie was taught at school had been those of Britain: the Highland Fling, the hornpipe.

 

Young Beryl also played the piano and sang.  She was always a showman - at eight she was reciting poetry in a charity concert, and soon after that took to organising performances in the back yard of her parents' home at 69 Roberts Street, where one day the Little Carib would stand.

 

McBurnie became a teacher after leaving school, and worked on school concerts, plays and operettas.  In her free time she would go out into the country with folklorist Andrew Carr, who was researching local traditions.

 

This work was interrupted in 1938 when McBurnie's father, a printer, took Beryl, the eldest of his four children, to New York to study medicine.  She didn't want to.  "I don't have the organisation, the discipline," she said.  "That would be a straitjacket."

 

She wanted to be a dancer, though her family thought it was a "terrible, terrible" idea.  But Beryl had her way.  "I must do exactly as I want to do," she said matter-of-factly.  And it was that determination, her famous indomitable will, which helped her overcome innumerable obstacles - and which, turned to obstinacy, also caused trouble.

 

In New York she studied the arts at Columbia University and learned dance from Martha Graham.  In 1940, on a visit home, she staged her first major production, A Trip through the Tropics.  She catered for all tastes, including not only West Indian dances but also classical European music, and it was a great success.

 

Coming home for good in 1942, McBurnie resumed command of her dance troupe, which Boscoe holder had run in her absence.  She worked as a dance instructor with the education Department, introducing folk dance in the schools.  She also travelled to the Guianas, Suriname and Brazil to do research, and in Cayenne she saw "a little intimate theatre", which she sketched as a model for a theatre of her own.

 

McBurnie's Little Carib Theatre opened in November 1948.  The foundation stone was laid by the great black American singer Paul Robeson, who was visiting Trinidad and whom McBurnie had known in New York.  The programme included the limbo and bongo of Trinidad, the saramacca and djukas of Suriname, and the Brazilian Terra Seca, as well as the original pieces Ah Passin, a "delightful market scene" and Massala, "a witty aged East Indian's dream of young love".

 

Among the guests were longstanding McBurnie supporters Albert Gomes and future Prime Minister Dr. Eric Williams, both part of the nationalist movement, which had also given rise to McBurnie.

 

Unfortunately, support for her theatre from these quarters never took more concrete form.  Aubrey Adams, a founder member of the Little Carib Dance Company, and later leader of his own, remembers the first theatre as a shed made of sheets of galvanised iron and palm leaves.  Costumes were equally basic: "We would use banana leaves or drape ourselves in a piece of cloth."  The Little Carib wasn't so much a building as an idea - a Big Idea, wrote the artist Wilson Minshall (father of Peter).  There was drumming and dancing every night at the Little Carib, plays and poetry readings and frequent performances.

 

McBurnie was the presiding genius.  "Beryl inspired us all," said Adams, who remained a close friend and supporter for the rest of McBurnie's life.  "She lectured us on the arts, on morals, values.  She had a library.  She got her supporters to come and visit us."

 

Molly Ahye was a principal dancer with the Little Carib Company from 1952-65.  "Beryl gave you the feeling that there was more to know.  The love and passion for dance that I got motivated me to do deeper research."

 

Ahye wrote a book about her mentor, Cradle of Caribbean Dance (Heritage Cultures, 1983).

 

"Beryl was always begging," said Ahye.  "Whatever we needed, Beryl had to get it."

 

Luckily, McBurnie had great powers of persuasion.  Ahye recalled: "I worked with BWIA, I had children, but I'd rehearse until one in the morning, I danced while I was pregnant…Beryl could get you to do anything."

 

But it wasn't easy, for all McBurnie's relentless charm and energy.  The dancers were amateurs, and rehearsals had to be fitted in whenever their paying jobs permitted.  Aubrey Adams remembers how embarrassed he was when McBurnie came to the government office where he was a young clerk, and persuaded him to rehearse for a show in his lunch hour - on the spot.  The other clerks watched, wile McBurnie, unfazed, beat time on a desk.

 

In 1957 McBurnie, accompanied by some of her dancers, went to teach at a summer school in the arts at what was then the University College of the West Indies in Jamaica.  There a young St Lucian writer called Derek Walcott saw in McBurnie's work the possibility of using folk material to create genuine West Indian theatre.  His Ti-Jean and His Brothers, which is based on St Lucian folklore and incorporates song, dance and dialect, was written shortly after this encounter.

 

By 1959 Walcott had moved to Trinidad and was holding weekly workshops at the Little Carib.  The Little Carib Theatre Workshop gave its first public performances in 1962.

 

But as far as McBurnie was concerned, dance had first claim on her theatre, and there were dramatic clashes between the two powerful personalities of McBurnie and Walcott.  More than once the actors arrived for rehearsals only to find that McBurnie had locked them out, and by the mid-60s the Little Carib and the Trinidad Theatre Workshop has parted ways for good.

 

McBurnie's eviction of drama in favour of dance had lasting and unfortunate consequences: the theatre's resident dance company is long defunct, and so for well over a decade now the Little Carib has been dark most nights.  Perhaps that's one reason why there's a lingering feeling that, despite the national awards, the tributes and the gala shows held in her honour, somehow McBurnie never got her due.  Her works are no longer performed and are not recorded on film.  There's no Little Carib Dance Company or Beryl McBurnie School of Dance.

 

Some of these omissions are due to McBurnie's own temperament.  She was highly strung, and as she admitted, lacked discipline.  Her determination could turn into an autocratic stubbornness; and the Little Carib remained always her personal realm.  Campaigning to scrape together funds for it in the early years took her away from teaching and choreographing.  She was an artist, not a businesswoman or a bureaucrat, so while she could always rally her forces for a special show, the dull, daily slog of management, of routine and rehearsals, wasn't for her.

 

But other dance companies still build on the foundation that McBurnie laid.  The folk dances that were in danger of being lost when she began her work are now carefully preserved and proudly displayed by community groups and folk dance companies.  Others combine the folk and the modern in choreography whose origins can be traced back to McBurnie's pioneers.  The Little Carib Theatre has a special place in the affections of the theatre fraternity.  And it has been clear for many years that McBurnie's legacy is a widespread and a lasting one.

 

This is a revised and abridged version of

"The First Lady of Dance" by Raymond, which appeared in the

BWEE Caribbean Beat magazine of

July/August 1996; it is used here with the kind permission of the publishers.

 

TOP

 

MCBURNIE: A GREAT LIFE

 

Trinidad Guardian

March 31, 2000

Page 1

 

Beryl McBurnie was born on November 2, attended the Canadian Mission School, followed by Tranquillity Girls' Intermediate School, where she received her secondary education.

 

After leaving Tranquillity, she attended the Government Training College for Teachers, after which she took up an appointment as a teacher.

 

During this period she developed a great interest in local folk dance, to which she later devoted her life.

 

Her interest in this art form took her to the Academy of Allied Arts, Evelyn Ellis School of Drama and Columbia University in the United States, where she studied dance, drama and music.

 

At Columbia she was tutored by Martha Graham, the celebrated American dance tutor.

 

In 1940, Beryl returned home to revitalize a small dance group she founded.

 

The group's first performance was entitled "A Trip Through the Tropics", and was held at Tent Theatre.

 

Little Carib Theatre was founded in her backyard in 1948 and became a mecca for folk art, which, over the years, inspired many dancers and singers.

 

In 1951, she took her little band of enthusiastic followers on tour to Canada, England, Europe and the Caribbean.

 

She pioneered local folk dance at a time when many believed local art forms to be sub-standard.

 

In 1957, McBurnie was appointed to teach dance at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus.  She was the first person in the region to be given this honour.

 

Following this appointment, she received invitations to lecture at colleges and universities all over the United States.  She seized every opportunity to lay the foundations for international acceptance of Caribbean dance as a serious art form.

 

In November, 1978, Alvin Ailey Dance Company in New York identified McBurnie as "one of the three extraordinary Black women who have had a profound influence on American dance."

 

In 1989, she was awarded the country's highest honour, the Trinity Cross.  She had previously been awarded the Humming Bird Medal.  She was also decorated with the OBE (Order of the British Empire).

TOP