Haiti O Ayiti

Ayiti is the island of mountains, where the Tainos, Arawaks, Marien, Magua, Maguana, Higuey, Xaragua and many others lived when christopher columbus* set foot in 1492. The date marks the beginning of the genocide, a brutal extractivism of the many territories of Abya Yala, and the enslavement of African peoples in the transatlantic* triangular trade. For more than 500 years this european-imposed* America has been defied.

Among the multitudinous and ongoing revolts on the island 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. Together and thanks to many great collaborators, they make a work in honor of Ayiti, its richness, its dances, and its inhabitants. Haiti o Ayiti is an homage to the island in the form of a dance poem. Diving in the deep waters of the Caribbean. Abismus invocatia abismus.

*at the explicit request of the makers, these words are written without a capital letter