By: Staff Writer
April 1, 2022
The Garth Fagan Dance Company, eponymously named after its founder, has been a staple in the Rochester New York area for over 30 years and still moulding young minorities.
Natalie Rogers-Cropper, school director for the Company, told Caribbean Magazine Plus: “We’ve had kids who started at five years old, still with us at 16. Then they go off to college. Some go into musical theater, some go into medicine and all different professions. They take things they have learned here, which is a lot of discipline, a lot of support, building self-esteem and achieving and still getting criticized but also in a healthy way. They take those lessons and all of them can do testimonials. They will come right up and say Garth Fagan Dance did this for me. This is where I learned a lot of the real world.”
She continued: “They all have a nice background when they finish our school. One of our students who came up right through to when she was old enough to leave high school is now community organizer. I just had a meeting the other day for the city of Rochester and she was in the meeting. And I said, ‘Oh, you’re doing so well’ as the head of this organization that improves life for youth of colour downtown. So our former students are doing good things and we feel very proud that at this amount of time however, for over twenty something years the school has been going on it has produced really good citizens.”
The Garth Fagan Dance Company was founded by the world renowned choreographer and educator, Garth Fagan, who is a Jamaican icon known around the world for his ground-breaking choreography of Broadway’s The Lion King. He is widely acknowledged as one of the most dynamic and original artists working in the field today and is coined as an architect of a distinct new movement style and creator of over 75 works for theatre and the concert stage. He is also an inspired teacher, and the man who transformed Rochester, NY into an incubator for world-class contemporary dance.
The company’s start began in the ‘70s when the country was just beginning to emerge from a tumultuous decade of riots and widespread unrest. As part of his recent appointment to the faculty at the State University of New York in Brockport, Garth Fagan began teaching dance classes at the SUNY Educational Opportunity Center in downtown Rochester.
Many of Garth’s students had no previous training. Most came from inner city, economically disadvantaged backgrounds. But Fagan was so inspired by their raw talent and tenacity that he decided to transform this highly unconventional group of dancers into a professional company, based not in one of the world’s cultural capitals but in upstate New York.
Natalie also told us that the school focuses “primarily” on minority children, but is open to anyone who loves to dance. “Minorities are first in terms of scholarships that’s our goal and the style of dance we do is linked to the African Diasporic experience. So when you come here, you can recognize right away, you see its modern dance, but you see the African and the Caribbean elements in it. So that’s how we are attracting the students of colour. But you know, there are scores of white students that come as well,” she said.
Natalie, who is Trinidadian by birth, came to the school in 1989 and has held various positions since that time, from assistant rehearsal director to overall school director and has been involved with dance all of her life.
Natalie sees Garth as a “Father figure” and credits him with most of her success in dance with him having shaped her into the woman she is today, providing the nurturing she needed and the discipline a “spoiled girl” like her required in order to mature.
Garth is not involved in the day to day instruction with the kids, Natalie said, “But he is always watching. He comes in time to time. Our summer institute for example where are kids start from 12 and up and he sees them and he loves watching their efforts and how much they’re committed. So he loves kids, period.”
