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 techniques these artists cultivated through the teaching and practice of Haitian folkloric dance, this interdisciplinary study illustrates how their embodied labor 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 dance writing, Dasha A. Chapman’s attention to embodied knowledge illuminates how movement practice operates as sites of theorization—wherein not just subjectivity, but also concepts of sovereignty, relationality, and decolonial 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.

Dasha A. Chapman is an interdisciplinary scholar, dance artist, educator, and serves on the Executive Board of the Haitian Studies Association.