ABSTRACT
Jamaican Wilbert ‘Bertie’ Passley, aka Berto Pasuka, came to Britain in 1939. With a brief study of classical ballet, he became a model for sculptors and sitter for photographers, took various acting and dancing jobs in the British lm and entertainment industry, but most importantly established the rst multiracial dance company, Les Ballets Nѐgres. This dance company was unlike anything seen before in Britain or Europe, in that it utilized Jamaican lived experiences as inspiration for full-length dance dramas. From its debut at the Twentieth Century Theatre at Westbourne Grove in London on 30 April 1946, till its demise in 1952, Les Ballet Nѐgres managed to have as much audience appeal as Sadler’s Wells Ballet, Ballets Jooss, Ballet Rambert and other dance companies prominent during those years. In the period following the Second World War, Les Ballets Nѐgres toured the United Kingdom and Europe to critical acclaim, often as the rst performing company in theatres recuperating after the ravages of war, with its sixteen dancers, drummers and administrative staff who were from Jamaica, Trinidad, England, British Guiana and West Africa. Berto Pasuka and his Les Ballets Nѐgres received enormous press coverage between 1946 and 1952. They are mentioned in music anthologies, BBC television collections, the British Film Institute collection and there are brief mentions in dance anthologies of the period. Despite this, little is known of Pasuka’s training and exposure to dance in Jamaica before 1939 nor of his training or performing in London during the 1939-1945 war. This chapter pieces together, from primary and secondary source material, recollections of Pasuka’s dance making from his time in Jamaica to the premiere of Les Ballets Nѐgres in 1946. It argues that Pasuka’s early exposure to Marcus Garvey’s ideas of self-help, self-reliance and Black internationalism was pivotal to Pasuka’s development into an extraordinary dance artist.
