Léna Blou

The body of a Guadeloupean dancer is strongly predisposed to imbalance. What is the meaning of the physical chaos expressed by the Léwòz dance in particular, and Caribbean dances in general? I used the Gwoka–the “traditional” Guadeloupean dance–as my referential archetype. By studying it scientifically, I was able to establish a nomenclature and identify concepts adapted to Caribbean corporeity. This taxonomy enriched my choreographic writing, and helped me define a new educational approach and take a different look at the Caribbean world. 

I coined the term Bigidi for the founding gesture that underpins the Caribbean musical-choreographic culture. It is a polysemous term referring to disequilibrium, swerving, feinting, the unpredictability of gesture, physical instability, and an inconsistent and unexpected body state. Bigidi provides keys to interpreting and understanding the technical nature and aesthetics of Caribbean dances, but also the heuristic, anthropological and philosophical aspects of Caribbean thinking, expressed in bodies referencing chaos, rupture, and adaptation. 

I would like my residency at Villa Albertine to be a living laboratory enabling me to reflect and experiment, with artists and thinkers. My aim is to verify the hypothesis according to which colonial and slave-trading history generated a way of moving the body that expresses a particular approach to the world, specifically pertaining to the theory of Bigidi. There is a philosophy of the body that is linked to a social philosophy. I aim to reveal the aesthetics of the harmony of disorder through creation and performance, both in dance and in other artistic disciplines (theater, painting, etc.). My praxis will be underpinned by reflection with researchers in order to develop the concepts inherent in Bigidi, which will be elucidated in seminars, panels, and articles. 

The Caribbean and the United States undeniably have a shared history–that of colonization. Houston, Chicago, and Atlanta, just like Guadeloupe, are heir to the phenomenon of racialization (Black/White). Through culture, the Caribbeans have developed life strategies outside the dominant system. “We are the creation of worlds that emigrated from the sea and the world’s end … and fire has not erased us,” D. Maximin once wrote. Because of the slave-trading history, the unstable nature of the place (hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, etc.), and the permanence of socio-economic relations based on racialization, the Caribbeans have incorporated chaos as a life force. And I wonder, What is the situation for African-Americans?  

Like Pointe-à-Pitre, Houston, Chicago, and Atlanta are places of human and social diversity, cultural crossroads marked by strong immigration, whether European, African, or Caribbean. Urbanization provides a specific intellectual, artistic, civic, and social context. I want to discover the places (DuSable Museum of African American History, Katherine Dunham Center for Arts and Humanities, APEX Museum in Atlanta, Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park, for instance), and meet artist and resource people (especially African-American) to see how they’re dealing with the weight of history. I am keen to exchange with researchers studying those issues and learning lessons from the corporality of American and Caribbean Afro-descendants–lessons that might provide answers for our 21st-century society. How can we inhabit the chaos-world? Does the Bigidi theory–whose basic principle is disorder/adaptation–apply to the United States?