Dance Dialogues – Jouvay Somatics: A Workshop on Healing with African-Caribbean Movement with Sonja Dumas

Emerging from the festival culture in the times of African enslavement, emancipation and colonialism in the Caribbean, the Trinidad and Tobago, jouvay is a cornerstone of Trinidad and Tobago carnival traditions. On the surface, it is a happy procession of people through the streets in the very early hours of the two main pre- Lenten days of carnival. However, when one looks at the history of jouvay, it is a cultural battlefield between colonial forces and the newly emancipated Africans performing resistance and resilience and seeking agency. It can be viewed as a liberatory practice that uses the technologies of the body with its remembered and re-interpreted movement of West African traditions of cosmology and community to forge healing that is at once collective and individual. Using an African-Caribbean framework that looks at the interrelatedness of body, mind, memory and spirit, the Jouvay Somatics will explore movements that are associated with traditional West and Central West African ways of moving and link them to the contemporary jouvay of Trinidad and Tobago and the acts of liberation that are still evident in the body.

Dumas is a performer, choreographer, writer, filmmaker, teacher and arts development consultant. She is the founder of Continuum Dance Project and initiator, co-founder and co-director of COCO Dance Festival, one of the largest annual contemporary dance festivals in the Caribbean. Her aesthetic is rooted in the historical and contemporary phenomena of the region. Dumas has performed with the Astor Johnson Repertory Dance Theatre, Reggie Wilson’s Fist and Heel Performance Group, and other groups. She is also an award-winning filmmaker and investigates the multifaceted cultural landscape of Trinidad and Tobago — in dance, in film and in her writing. Most recently, her chapter on the history of dance in the region was published in the Foundation Readings on the History of Trinidad and Tobago, a publication aimed at enhancing arts education in schools across the country.

Image credit: Sonja Dumas. Photographer Michele Jorsling