Rex Nettleford
Jamaican academic
Ralston Milton "Rex" Nettleford OM OCC FIJ (3 February 1933 – 2 February 2010) was a Jamaican scholar, social critic, choreographer, and Vice-Chancellor Emeritus of the University of the West Indies (UWI), the leading research university in the Commonwealth Caribbean.
Biography
Rex Nettleford was born on February 3, 1933 in Falmouth, Jamaica, Nettleford attended Unity Primary School in Bunkers Hill, Trelawny, and graduated from Cornwall College in Montego Bay, before going to the University of the West Indies (UWI) to obtain an honours degree in history. As a child, he sang and recited in school concerts, sang in the church choir, danced, and began working as a choreographer at the age of 11 with the Worm Chambers Variety Troupe, which helped to fund his studies. At Cornwall College, he acted in productions of the college's drama club, and was published as a poet. He was a recipient of the 1957 Rhodes Scholarship to Oriel College, Oxford, where he received a postgraduate degree in Politics, returning to Jamaica in the early 1960s to take up a position at UWI.
At UWI, he first gained recognition as a co-author (with M. G. Smith and Roy Augier) of a groundbreaking study of the Rastafari movement in 1961. In 1962, Nettleford and Eddy Thomas co-founded the National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica, an ensemble which under his direction did much to incorporate traditional Jamaican music and dance into a formal balletic repertoire.
For more than twenty years, Nettleford was also artistic director for the University Singers of UWI at Mona campus. The combination of Nettleford as artistic director and Noel Dexter as musical director with the University Singers, saw the creation of what is referred to as "choral theatre".
Beginning with the collection of essays, Mirror, Mirror, published in 1969, and his editing and compiling of the speeches and writings of Norman Manley, Manley and the New Jamaica; in 1971, Nettleford established himself as a serious public historian and social critic. In 1968, he took over direction of the School for Continuing Studies at UWI and then of the Extra-Mural Department.
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