publication

“Manbo Ayizan on a New York Stage” critically assesses the dialectical relationship Haitian-Canadian dancemaker Roxane D’Orléans Juste maintains between her Black/Haitian and womanist legacies and her mastery of Euro-American modern dance forms––namely the José Limón technique. Inspired by oral history techniques, the essay leverages D’Orléans Juste’s biographical narratives to propose that she is a stand-in for other African diasporic artists who cultivate “place” and imagine difference within inclusivity across geopolitical and cultural boundaries. The essay connects to the author's larger project that documents how contemporary Haitian choreographers mobilize the aesthetics and embodied techniques of Vodou, the Afro-syncretic religion of Haiti to simultaneously revive and destabilize spectators’ misconceptions about Haitians, ones with immediate ties to centuries of Global North political, social, and religious interventions in Haiti.