The Wild Reed: “Creative Outsider, Determined Innovator”: Remembering Berto Pasuka

Tuesday, July 12, 2022

“Creative Outsider, Determined Innovator”: Remembering Berto Pasuka

The Wild Reed’s 2022 Queer Appreciation series continues with a tribute to Jamaican dancer and choreographer Berto Pasuka (1911-1963).

Writes artist and archivist Dr. Marcus Bunyan:

Born Wilbert Passerley in Jamaica, Berto Pasuka ignored his family’s wishes for him to become a dentist, instead following his own passion to dance. He studied classical ballet in Kingston, where he first saw a group of descendants of runaway slaves dancing to the rhythmic beat of a drum. Feeling inspired to take black dance to new audiences, he moved to London in 1939, enrolling at the Astafieva Dance School to polish off his choreography skills. Following his work on the movie Men of Two Worlds, he and fellow Jamaican dancer Richie Riley decided to create their own dance company. Les Ballet Nègres was born in the 1940s, bringing traditional and contemporary black dance to the UK and Europe with sell-out tours.

Following is an excerpt from BlackOut UK’s 2019 tribute to Berto Pasuka.

________________________

Berto Pasuka was a Jamaican migrant before the sailing of The Windrush. A film actor, dancer, innovator and entrepreneur who came from a modest background, and founded Les Ballets Nègres with his compatriot Richie Riley; Europe’s first black-led dance company in modern times.

A leader, who enjoyed some celebrity in British and European post-war high society, Pasuka carved a new space in the story of British dance for Black people. The dance company was met with critical acclaim but fell apart only six years later, unable to access the public subsidy that other companies were deemed to be worthy of.

Pasuka’s story ends tragically early; after his return from a period seeking his fortune in Paris at the age of only 52.

Berto Pasuka is one of the few Black and queer men who feature in the National Portrait Gallery collection – a place he held well before Simon Fredrick’s excellent 2018 Black is the New Black exhibition at the gallery. His life story speaks to the creative outsider, determined innovator, radical convenor and visionary that is recognisable from the story of so many Black queer Britons.

– Excerpted from “Pasuka Who?
Black, Queer, British and Visible”
BlackOut UK
February 5, 2019

Following is rare footage of Les Ballets Nègres’s appearance on BBC Television on June 24, 1946. Two ballets where performed, “They Came” and “Market Day,” though only snippets of each are shown in this 2-minute video, one that has no sound.

Postscript: Writes Keith Watson . . .

The name Les Ballets Nègres was actually a cunning artifice. Trading on sophisticated French cachet, it fitted perfectly into the post-war cultural milieu while also sliding the idea of “black” into the forefront in an era when the only word anyone used was “coloured.” But if this was ballet, it was not as anyone knew it. As Richie Riley notes in his history of the company, “negro ballet is something vital in choreographic art. As conceived by Berto Pasuka, it is essentially an expression of human emotion in dance form, being the complete antithesis of Russian ballet, with its stereotyped entrechats and point work.”

Drawing inspiration from Afro-Caribbean folk-tales and rituals, Pasuka and Riley were bringing dance out of their own cultural background, labelling it “ballet” as little more than a flag of convenience.

Audiences lapped up their rhythmic dynamism, a world away from the uptight formalism of European classicism. That they foundered, primarily on the rocks of financial mismanagement, represents a great missed opportunity for British dance.