Content area
Full Text
In 1952 Trinidadian choreographer Geoffrey Holder encountered Jean Leon-Destiné's Haitian Dance Company in Puerto Rico at the first Caribbean Festival of the Arts (Dunning 2002:32). At the festival Holder saw Destiné'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. émigré, 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 Black diaspora. Importantly, this article will highlight some of the choreographic choices that Holder engaged in making fusional Haitianbased work that also expressed his shifting positionality as a Trinidadian dance artist living in the United States.
Geoffrey Holder 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 Holder 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...