Ayiti, island of mountains, where the Tainos, Arawaks, Marien, Magua, Maguana, Higuey, Xaragua and many others lived when christopher columbus set foot in 1492. 1492 marks the beginning of the genocide, the brutal extractivism of the many territories of Abya Yala, and the enslavement of African peoples in the triangulated trade. For more than 500 years this european-imposed America has been defied. Among the multitudinous and ongoing revolts stands famous a dance gathering: a congress, Vodou ceremony and war council summoned by an African priestess that sparked the glorious and triumphant Haitian Revolution in 1791. A Revolution that is hidden to this day from the political imaginary of those who struggle for a world where many worlds fit.
Cecilia Lisa Eliceche and Leandro Nerefuh want to learn from Haiti about anti-colonial resistance through and in the form of dance and cultivation. One is no one without others. Together and thanks to many great collaborators Cecilia and Leandro will make a work in honor of Ayiti, its richness, its dances, and its divine inhabitants. An homage to the island in the form of a dance poem. Diving in the deep waters of the Caribbean. Abismus invocatia Abismus.
The Dutch premiere took place in Brakke Grond (Amsterdam) on the 7th and 8th of November 2019.