Coming soon. Grounding Practice: Dancing Haiti on Tè Glise
- Author: Chapman, Dasha A.
Coming soon. Grounding Practice: Dancing Haiti on Tè Glise
- Author: Chapman, Dasha A.
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Grounding Practice: Dancing Haiti on Tè Glise tracks the responsive physical techniques Haitian dancers devised for navigating precarity, making place, and igniting repair in the decade following the 2010 earthquake. Via the concept “grounding practice,” which connotes the powerful community building and placemaking made possible by the teaching and practice of Haitian folkloric dance, this interdisciplinary study illustrates how the embodied labor of revitalizing traditions took on increasing relevance as vital reparative worldmaking amidst instability, or tè glise–—Haitian Creole for sliding land or slippery ground.
The dancers in Grounding Practice regenerate understandings of Haitian dance’s potential for fomenting decolonial consciousness, meaningfully sustaining African-derived culture, birthing new social relations, activating the queer potentials of tradition, and ultimately making place. Through ethnography and vivid descriptions, Dasha A. Chapman’s attention to embodied knowledge illuminates how movement practice operates as a site of theorization—wherein not just subjectivity, but also concepts of sovereignty, relation, and futurity, are articulated through the body. Paying homage to important forebears yet moving us beyond static narratives, this study brings our understanding of Haitian dance—and Haiti—through expansive landscapes into the contemporary.
Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Notes on Language and Naming
- Preface | Shifting Ground: From Kriz to Kase
- Introduction
- Grounding Practice
- Dancing Haiti on Tè Glise
- Kase 1 | Haunted Grounds
- Chapter 1Ekspresyon and Fòs
- The Performativity of Practice and the Work of Folkloric Dance in Post-Earthquake Port-au-Prince
- Kase 2 | Bulldozed Grounds
- Chapter 2Disiplin and Dyaspora
- Tensions and Possibilities in Haitian Diasporic Dance Pedagogies
- Kase 3 | Entangled Grounds
- Chapter 3Lessons in Placemaking
- Grounding Practice and Feeling Fòs with Lahens Louis
- Kase 4 | Gendered Grounds
- Chapter 4Gran Lakou
- Yonel Charles’s M-Techniques for Building a Queer Place
- Kase 5 | Sacred Grounds
- Chapter 5Lakou Ayiti
- Practice and Placemaking in Jean Appolon’s Saturday Classes
- Epilogue | From Kase to Kafou: In Rupture, Many Crossroads
- Postscript | 1825|2025: Confluences and Echoes
- Glossary
- Bibliography
