A No­ble Cel­e­bra­tion at Queen’s Hall on May 17 and 18 was not on­ly a trib­ute in dance to an out­stand­ing dancer and chore­o­g­ra­ph­er but a cel­e­bra­tion of two ma­jor mile­stones: the 50th an­niver­sary of Lil­liput Chil­dren’s The­atre and the 40th an­niver­sary of the No­ble Dou­glas Dance Com­pa­ny Inc (ND­DC).

“With a name like No­ble, we had no choice but to go big,” said di­rec­tor Wen­dell Man­war­ren of the pro­duc­tion that ho­n­oured No­ble Dou­glas.

“From re­gal cos­tumes to bold sto­ry­telling, every­thing re­flects the gen­eros­i­ty and great­ness No­ble has poured in­to the arts for over five decades.”

In a pow­er­ful trib­ute to her chore­o­graph­ic im­pact, vet­er­an dancers from the ND­DC re­turned to the stage to re­vive works from icon­ic shows.

Pieces like Bago, chore­o­graphed by Del­ton Frank, which weaves To­ba­go’s tra­di­tion­al jig in­to its com­po­si­tion, and the rhyth­mi­cal­ly rich Red Clay (Al­lan Bal­four) and Rum and Sal­va­tion (Reg­gie Wil­son), re­flect her abil­i­ty to root con­tem­po­rary move­ment in Caribbean his­to­ry and cul­tur­al iden­ti­ty.

Dou­glas be­gan her dance ed­u­ca­tion with the Caribbean School of Danc­ing and lat­er moved to the Lon­don Col­lege of Dance and Dra­ma and the School of Con­tem­po­rary Dance in Eng­land. She fur­thered her dance train­ing in the Unit­ed States at the Martha Gra­ham School of Con­tem­po­rary Dance and the Alvin Ai­ley Amer­i­can Dance Cen­tre.

This set the stage for her pro­fes­sion­al dance ca­reer in the Unit­ed States dur­ing the 70s as a mem­ber of the Lar Lubovitch Dance Com­pa­ny. On her re­turn to T&T in 1974, she per­formed with As­tor John­son’s Reper­to­ry Dance The­atre and Derek Wal­cott’s Trinidad The­atre Work­shop (TTW).

In 1975, Dou­glas part­nered with ac­tor Tony Hall to found Lil­liput which has grown to be­come T&T’s fore­most chil­dren’s the­atre com­pa­ny. In 1977, she co-found­ed the La Chapelle/Dou­glas Dance Com­pa­ny and in 1985, she fi­nal­ly es­tab­lished her own com­pa­ny, ND­DC.

Her com­mit­ment to the de­vel­op­ment of the arts and cul­ture re­ceived na­tion­al recog­ni­tion when she re­ceived T&T’s sec­ond high­est award, the pres­ti­gious Hum­ming­bird Medal—Gold. She was al­so the re­cip­i­ent of the Cacique Award for best chore­og­ra­phy in the TTW’s 2005 pro­duc­tion of Derek Wal­cott’s mu­si­cal, STEEL, and a Van­guard Cacique Award for her work with Lil­liput.

Through Car­ni­val, dance, dra­ma, and decades of men­tor­ship, No­ble Dou­glas has em­pow­ered gen­er­a­tions to dream bold­ly and ex­press them­selves with con­fi­dence. Even dur­ing the dark­est days of the pan­dem­ic, she re­mained un­daunt­ed—tough as nails and soft like put­ty when it came to those she nur­tured.