Haiti dances to a different drummer: a country in turmoil turns to ancient folk religion, with rich results for dance - includes article on dancer Katherine Dunham's continuing dance and political activities

Dance Magazine, August, 1994 by Elizabeth Barad

Max Beauvoir explained possession in the voudon faith. "By dancing as well as you can," he said, "you give God a present and therefore receive a fragment of God, one of the loas." The spirits are physical representations of particular godlike principles--power, love, death--and each spirit has a distinctive dance.

Because the man who had stepped on my foot at the ceremony danced the nago-grand-coup, the congregants

said he was possessed by the warrior spirit, Ogoun. Wearing the spirit's color, red, he moved his feet powerfully and rotated his shoulders alternately, with widespread arms. Devotees gave the possessed man burning branches, and he swallowed the fire without fear or harm while he continued dancing.

On another occasion, when Ogoun performed the nago-grand-coup in Beauvoir's body at a ceremony for the National Body of Voudonists, the spirit, through Beauvoir, downed a bottle of what the celebrants told me was the spirit's favorite scotch, Johnnie Walker. Then, with his balance intact, Beauvoir resumed dancing.

In 1804 the voudon priest, Boukman, performed this same dance at the ceremony that triggered the slaves' revolt. And the leader of the top musical group in Haiti, Boukman Eksperyans, which was named after that priest, dances the nago-grand-coup while he sings anti-government songs. The entire group performs this and other voudon steps at concerts, despite the military government's intimidating gunfire.

Joan Peters, a Dunham technique teacher, uses the movements of the nago-grand-coup, particularly the widespread arms, in the floor work that she teaches at the Alvin Ailey school in Manhattan. Peters's experimental dance ensemble has also performed a voudon-inspired work titled Yanvalu by Peters's mentor, the late Syvilla Fort. Fort was a dancer with Katherine Dunham Dance Company and the director of its school.

Yanvalu portrays Erzulie, the goddess of love, who is carried on a platform as she admires herself in a mirror. Erzulie's dance is the zepol-dahomi, four double steps forward and four back.

My introduction to the spirit Erzulie was at a private ceremony in Beauvoir's temple. Although Erzulie, vain and a lover of beauty, usually uses an agile young woman's body, at this ceremony she possessed an old, lame woman. To watch this aged lady dance the zepoldahomi for three hours, twirling delicately, was perhaps to witness the divine.

Erzulie also has a sea aspect, and the dances of one of her spiritual consorts, Agwe, the god of the sea, are performed in ceremonies by the boat people before they set out on their hazardous journey to the mainland. When the unfortunate refugees are intercepted and returnedby the United States Coast Guard to Haiti, where they face starvation and political persecution, the dance of Ghede, the lord of resurrection and the loa of death, dominates their ceremonies.

Ghede's dance is the banda, which I saw at a ceremony in a tin-roofed temple near the open sewers that flow into the Port-au-Prince waterfront. A man possessed by Ghede, wearing black tails, Ghede's trademark, stood leering at me, moving his hips backward and forward, imitating intercourse. With this movement, Ghede laughs at men's fear of death and expresses another principle he represents--fertility, God's ability to give life. Dunham said that her Roi Zombie in L'Ag'ya portrays Ghede and that her choreography in that piece was inspired by the banda.