Mirror Mirror

Born in Falmouth, Jamaica, Nettleford graduated from Cornwall College in Montego Bay, Jamaica before going to the UWI to obtain an honours degree in history. He was a recipient of the 1957 Rhodes Scholarship to Oriel College, Oxford where he received a postgraduate degree in Politics, and returned to Jamaica in the early 1960s to take up a position at the University of the West Indies. At the UWI he first came to attention as a co-author (with M.G. Smith and Roy Augier) of a groundbreaking study of the Rastafari movement in 1961. In 1963 he 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.