Beryl McBurnie

Beryl Eugenia McBurnie was born on the second of November 1913 at the Port of Spain district of Woodbrook, Trinidad, the second of seven children of John McBurnie — a worker at the Port of Spain customs house of mixed African and Scottish descent — and Lillie McBurnie, a homemaker. The McBurnie household was Black middle-class and culturally educated. She was educated at the Tranquillity Government School at Port of Spain from 1918 to 1928 and at the Tranquillity Teachers' Training College from 1928 to 1931. She qualified as a primary-school teacher in 1931 and taught at the Tranquillity school for the following five years.

She travelled across the southern Trinidadian rural districts through her teaching years collecting the survivals of African and Indo-Caribbean folk-dance practice — the bele, the bongo, the orisha, the kalinda, the dama, the ramleela — and recovering material she would across the following decade build into the founding repertoire of the Trinidadian theatrical-dance tradition. She left teaching in 1936 to pursue dance professionally.

She emigrated to New York in 1938 on a scholarship to the Martha Graham School of Modern Dance and studied subsequently at the Hanya Holm Studio and the Katherine Dunham School of Dance through 1941. She returned to Trinidad in 1941 and founded in 1943 the Little Carib Theatre at the Roberts Street, Woodbrook — the first formally constituted theatrical-dance company of the Anglo-Caribbean. She directed the Little Carib for the following forty-five years.

The Little Carib repertoire — built on the folk-dance survivals she had recovered through the 1930s — premiered at the Princes Building in Port of Spain in November 1948 in the presence of the Duke of Edinburgh and of Paul Robeson (placed in this archive), who toured the production through the Caribbean and the United States the following year. The repertoire established the Little Carib as the principal model for the Caribbean national folk-dance companies that emerged across the 1950s and 1960s.

She was awarded the Trinity Cross of Trinidad and Tobago in 1989 — the highest civilian honour of the republic.

She died at Port of Spain on the thirtieth of March 2000, at eighty-six.

She is honored here as the founder of the Little Carib.