Nicole Durrant

Nicole Durrant is a Jamaican-born dancer, choreographer, and educator whose work centers on Afro-Caribbean movement traditions and cultural storytelling. Durrant trained at the Jamaica School of Dance Junior Department and holds a BFA from the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Jamaica and has dedicated her career to preserving and celebrating the rich heritage of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora through dance. She is motivated by the conviction that dance speaks the body’s secondary language.

In 2024, Durrant organized the inaugural Cayman Islands Afro Dance Conference, a three-day event aimed at sharing the culture and heritage of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora through dance and music. She is also the Programs Coordinator at the Cayman National Cultural Foundation. Through her multifaceted works, Durrant continues to be a vital force in preserving and promoting Afro-Caribbean dance traditions, ensuring that the stories and rhythms of her heritage resonate across cultures and generations.

CIRCLES OF TIME ARTWORK

Talking To Hazel

Dance Short Film

Concept by Nicole Durrant

Performed by Nicole Durrant

Production by Ileann Powery of iPow Creations

Photography by Ileann Powery

Nicole Durrant’s Talking to Hazel is a multidisciplinary work that blends dance, film, and visual art to explore intergenerational memory, ancestry, and the enduring presence of matriarchal legacy. Originally presented during Cayman Art Week at Parcel 110, the piece was conceptualized and performed by Durrant, offering a deeply personal encounter with her grandmother, Hazel. Through movement, Durant channels Hazel’s untamed rhythm and restless grace, allowing her presence to ripple across time. Accompanying photography prints extend this gesture, layering the work with quiet echoes of remembrance and inherited identity.

In keeping with the themes of Circles of Time, Talking to Hazel becomes more than a tribute. It becomes ritual. Durrant invites viewers into a space where memory is not fixed in image but exists as living, untamed motion, circling backward through matriarchal lines and flowing forward into contemporary experience. A ritual in movement, a gesture of connection between the living and the departed, reminding us that they are still woven into our lives.

Her work hovers between dream and recollection, ancestral vision and present embodiment. It affirms that time is not linear but cyclical, and that cultural inheritance moves through the bodies that dance, the voices that speak, and the legacies we carry. Through movement, spoken word, and film, Talking to Hazel navigates the sacred space where past and present converge.