Yanvalou's Elliptic Displacements: Staging Spirit Time in the United States

Abstract

The Haitian dance Yanvalou has made many elliptic displacements in traveling between ceremony and the stage in different locations. Choreographies the Haitian dance Yanvalou offer viable grounds for analyses the intersections between moments, glimmers, or infusions and their intersections with communities and black diasporic political configurations. Yanvalou is danced specifically for the Haitian Damballah and for all the spirits in the Rada rites. Damballah, as one the oldest ancestral spirits, offers guidance through dance, songs, and music in ceremonial settings (Michel 1995, Fleurant 1996). Due to historic divisions between Vodou and Haitian staged dance, which occurred amidst the indigenist impulse to create a dance-based idiom for tradition in Haiti in the 1940's, spiritual engagement is differentially expressed in choreographies. In specific, this spiritual excess, or energy, is what is leftover after the steps have been taken from ceremony, revised in many instances, and made for the stage. This article will endeavor to analyze the transfigurations and performance in choreographies Yanvalou made by Mikerline Pierre, Blanche Brown, and Abdel Salaam, who engage with often-overlapping notions politics and ancestral guidance to create community and notions liberation. This configuration spiritual presence in choreographies Haitian dance counters indigenist separations between the spirits' presence in Vodou ceremony and staged Haitian dance by suggesting that there is an excess spiritual energy in movement that informs choreographers' choices. Indigenist writers Jean Price-Mars and Michel Lamartiniere Honorât both articulated a separation between Vodou spiritual presence and Haitian folklore (Price-Mars 1928, Honorât 1955). This not-so-tidy separation ancestral energy and performance resulted in a modern notion Haitian identity expressed in dance. In addressing choreographies Yanvalou, my goal is to analyze the very real ways in which movements for/from the ancestral Damballah flesh out spiritual lessons and guidance to different populations. Accepting the spiritual presence in choreographies Haitian dance is a political act that suggests different views diaspora as ancestral linkages and excavates complicated histories travel and presence alternate spaces. This conception in Haitian dance draws upon art historian Robert Farris Thompson's notion the flash the spirit and embodied knowledge that may permit the reading the spark spiritual excess that runs through and hovers over some performances Haitian dance (Thompson 1984). Thompson mentions to the flash the spirit in African diasporic art in reference to the work black American artist Henry Dorsey, as a way of realizing spiritual transcendence through material metaphors (Thompson 1984, 158). In comparison, Michael Taussig suggests that there is a spiritual transfer between ceremonial objects, movements, and music that occurs through the process their reproduction. Mimesis, or the reproduction and transfer spirituality, organizes the senses (Taussig 1993). This conception spirituality addresses the creative genius black artists and assumes that the codes and ciphers made by black artists are indeed often materialized and decipherable in the plastic arts and dance in the black diaspora. I read the spiritual presence in choreographies Yanvalou through my own body and embodied knowledge. My body, trained in Haitian dance, reacts to in dance by developing what I will term spiritual pulling. Spiritual occurs when one is not possessed but feels the spirits pulling on the head, emotions, and body. The symptoms this may include crying, the hair raising on one's body, nausea, and the loss bodily control. As it has been explained to me, these interactions with the spirits are attributable to their feeling out the openness one's flesh and consciousness. …