Grounding Practice
Dancing Haiti on Tè Glise
The worldmaking potential of Haitian folkloric dance
Description
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.
Dasha A. Chapman is an interdisciplinary scholar, dance artist, and educator who actively serves on the Board of the Haitian Studies Association and is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Haitian Studies.
Reviews
”Grounding Practice: Dancing Haiti on Tè Glise illuminates the labor of Haitian dancers to (re)make Haiti and create connection, care, and a sense of belonging while enduring tenuous conditions, in the decade or so following the 2010 earthquake. The book is a beautiful archive that, through the granular dance pedagogy practices that Chapman documents, will help produce Haitian dance as a dynamic, decolonial, and continuous project into the future.”
- Erin Durban, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
“Grounding Practice: Dancing Haiti on Tè Glise shows how pedagogues create safe spaces for communal gathering and self-expression. Grounding Practice is a tour-de-force that highlights Haitian history, agency, community building and place-making through the practice and pedagogy of Haitian Folkloric Dance.”
- Yolanda Covington-Ward, University of Massachusetts Amherst
“Grounding Practice centers contemporary Haitian artists’ technique and theory, bringing dance into Black geographies, Kreyòl epistemes, and queer Haitian studies. From Port-au-Prince to Boston, Chapman showcases detailed movement description, performance analysis, interviews, and historical research, with explicit reflexivity to articulate how embodied practice makes—and remakes—Haiti/Ayiti amid crisis, precarity, and revolutionary promise. A wonderful and necessary addition to the fields of ethnography, dance history, and Black diasporic cultural production.”
- Melissa Blanco Borelli, Northwestern University
“This book makes a critical contribution to Haitian Studies, Dance Studies, and Caribbean Studies. Dasha Chapman meticulously illustrates the central and sacred role that folkloric dance plays in Haitian culture as a site of konesans, knowledge production and Haitian epistemologies. Dance is at the heart of Haiti’s revolution. It is resistance, power and liberation!”
- Cécile Accilien, University of Maryland