The stage that kept the folk forms

Pioneering Jamaican dancer and choreographer whose Ivy Baxter Creative Dance Group, from around 1950, was the first to build concert work on Jamaican folk movement, laying the ground for the NDTC generation.

Afro-Jamaican ceremonial practice rooted in the Kongo heritage of post-emancipation Central African arrivals, strongest in St Thomas: kbandu and playing-cyas drums, call-and-response song and Kongo-derived ritual language in ceremonies for ancestors. Its drumming fed the Rastafari nyabinghi tradition and, through it, reggae.

Jamaican dancer and choreographer who co-founded the National Dance Theatre Company with Rex Nettleford in 1962, having trained in modern dance in New York under Martha Graham and others.

Tertiary dance-training school within the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts (formerly the Cultural Training Centre), founded by figures from the NDTC circle to professionalise Jamaican and Caribbean concert dance.

Jamaican choreographer, dancer and author, founder and artistic director of L'ACADCO and creator of L'Antech, a codified Caribbean contemporary technique. She was among the first to place dancehall movement on a concert stage, notably in her 1984 piece 'Bouyaka Bouyaka' at the Little Theatre.

Jamaican concert-dance company founded in 1962 at Independence by Rex Nettleford and Eddy Thomas, dedicated to researching and staging Caribbean folk forms (Kumina, Jonkonnu, revival) alongside modern dance. Its music and drumming ensembles preserved traditional rhythms for the concert stage.

Jamaican dancer, choreographer, cultural scholar and University of the West Indies Vice-Chancellor (1928-2010), co-founder and long-serving artistic director of the National Dance Theatre Company. His writing on Caribbean identity and 'smadditizin' framed how the region reads its own performance culture.

Jamaican musicologist, percussionist and long-time musical director of the National Dance Theatre Company, an authority on Kumina, Revival and other Afro-Jamaican rhythmic traditions and a teacher at the Jamaica School of Music.

Contemporary dance company founded by L'Antoinette Stines, reborn in Jamaica in 1982 after a Miami start, drawing dancers from across the Caribbean and building repertory on Stines's L'Antech technique. It brought dancehall and Afro-Caribbean vocabulary to the proscenium stage.

The masked street masquerade of the Jamaican Christmas: costumed characters — Horsehead, Pitchy-Patchy, the Devil among them — processing behind fife and drum, in a tradition documented since the plantation era that blends African masquerade with European mumming. Parish troupes and Festival stagings keep it alive.

The Tom Redcam Avenue theatre, opened in 1961, and the long-time home of the National Pantomime — the annual production that has served as a training ground and showcase for Jamaican performers, musicians and songwriters for decades, and a bridge between the formal stage and popular music.