Did You Say Banda? Geoffrey Holder and How Stories Circulate

Abstract

In 1952 Trinidadian choreographer Geoffrey encountered Jean Leon-Destine's Haitian Dance Company in Puerto Rico at the first Caribbean Festival of the Arts (Dunning 2002:32). At the festival Destine's company perform the Haitian dance Banda. In her biography of Holder, Jennifer Dunning indicates, Holder was stunned by what he saw (Dunning 2002:32). Banda is a dance for the Haitian Gede spirits whose manifestations and movement make known their abilities to take life, heal, and create laughter. While many of Holder's theatrical presentations have received great acclaim, his choreographic work has not often been analyzed as an expression of contemporary Caribbean or diasporic identity. Geoffrey Holder, a Trinidadian national and U.S. emigre, revised ideas of Caribbeaness, diasporic aesthetics and home in his Banda and Haitian-based choreographies. This article will argue that Geoffrey Holder's productions of Banda and Banda-influenced movement for the Broadway show The House of Flowers, the Dance Theater of Harlem and Alvin Ailey Dance Theater, introduce translations of Haitian dance that conjoin different fusions of movement to produce new identities in the diaspora. Importantly, this article will highlight some of the choreographic choices that engaged in making fusional Haitianbased work that also expressed his shifting positionality as a Trinidadian dance artist living in the United States. Geoffrey decided to move to New York in 1953. This move situated him amidst a circulation and reconfiguration of African diasporic dance and modern dance that was balancing along racialized lines. Holder, already trained in Trinidadian dance and quite possibly some form of modern dance in Trinidad through his research and performance with his brother's company, Boscoe and His Caribbean Dancers, was well aware of staging practices extant in the Caribbean. Holder's arrival in New York, however, planted him amidst a circulation of modern and modern African-based practices that were intersecting in different ways (Manning 2004, Perpener 2001). Modern African dance in the United States is a combination of African- based dance forms and aspects of American modern dance that were circulating and fusing in the 1950's. Dance historian, John Perpener states, Black dance artists such as Winfield, Dunham, and Primus were members of a long line of African descendants who had used cultural creolization as a means of adapting to an environment that was complex, proscriptive, and forbidding (Perpener 2001: 178). Artists such as Asadata Dafora, Pearl Primus, and Katherine Dunham creatively employed African-based dance practices, modern dance and ballet as they sought out new possibilities for expressing their visions and subjectivities amidst a predominantly modern dance scene. Holder's Haitian-based dance-making was informed by the circulations of modern technique including those of Katherine Dunham, Lester Horton and most likely Hanya Holms, in addition to the variety of dances from Africa and the Caribbean. Dance historian Susan Manning indicates that in the post-war years the media and critics differentially considered the division between modern dance produced by artists and modern dance produced by black artists (Manning 2004). was most definitely attuned to the U.S. based designations that coded modern dance and color into categories of black and white. These pre-1960's notions of art and culture imbricate configurations of nation that assume a white coding for dance made for the concert stage. By creating fusional work that combined modern dance and Caribbean dance, effectively challenged unnamed and insidiously racialized national boundaries that attributed whiteness to modern dance and ballet, thus asserting his citizenship and Caribbean identity. The struggles over representation, race and identity were indeed played-out in the creation and reception of modern dance formulated by black artists. …