♦ Haitian Theatre : incursions into dramaturgy and performance
For Hervé Denis

It would be simplistic to presume to cover the vast territory of Haitian theatre in a single article given the long and complex history of this art form. Dramaturgy, stage practices and conditions of production have evolved in many directions since independence in 1804. The defining political and social upheavals, and the resulting movements of population away from the island in the 1960's and 1970's , have had a direct impact on the conditions of possibility of all artistic endeavour, creating, among other things, networks of theatre practitioners who have thrived in France, Senegal, throughout North America and the Caribbean. I would like to begin by contextualizing some of the significant moments of this theatre before analysing, albeit too briefly, two performances, one by actor / playwright Frankétienne (Totolomannwèl) and one by the writer / story teller Mimi Barthélémy, (Une très belle mort) two artists who represent very different orientations of stage practice but who have attained the status of cultural icons because their person has come to epitomize the multiple dynamics at the source of contemporary theatre in Haiti.

After independence (1804) much of the dramaturgy continued to follow the pathway already traced by the implantation of the French theatrical canon during the colonial period. Fixed categories of European theatre seemed to orient the playwrights as well as later critical material. Robert Cornevin's seminal work, Le théâtre haïtien,[1] (1973), modelled after his history of African theatre, is presently the only book on the subject , which suggests that a more contemporary approach to Haitian theatre scholarship is long overdue. Cornevin speaks of Haitian romanticism dating from 1836, of the period designated as La Ronde (106), referring to the group associated with the literary journal La Ronde (1892-1902), a period, dominated by playwrights such as Massillon Coicou (Liberté), Henry Chauvet (La fille du Kacik), Isnardin Vieux (Makendal) and Charles Moravia (L'Amiral Killick). These works draw on themes from Haitian history but the theatrical form still owed much to European dramaturgy and the notion of a theatrical canon in Creole was not yet considered possible.

According to Cornevin, contemporary Haitian theatre dates from 1915, the moment the Americans occupied the country. He also speaks of the emergence of the Indigéniste movement, ancestor of the Négritude movement, (128.) and its special relationship with theatre. The école indigéniste emphasized the importance of local traditions, thus orienting cultural practices of all kinds away from European (mainly French) influences, towards a popular national theatre, one that would speak to the Afro-Haitian masses. As one can see, categories of skin colour , ethnicity and social class, have been the driving forces underlying this new populist consciousness of locally based culture, as exemplified by the importance given to creole as the language of the stage, as well as to research on the histories of the indigenous Caribbean populations. Emile Nau's l'Histoire des Caciques de Haïti [2] inspired a series of plays dealing with the most important figure of pre-Hispanic Haitian culture, Anacaona the poet queen of the Taino people who defied the powers of the Spanish monarchy and the Catholic church, and was burnt alive, thus assuring her status as one of the great legendary figures of Haitian history. The last in a line of Anacaona plays, written by Jean Métellus (1985) [3] gives the poet Queen the theatrical presence of a conflicted tragic figure, not unlike that of Henri Christophe, Lumumba (Aimé Césaire) or Dessalines (Vincent Placoly) [4] Haitian playwright Jean Métellus describes her highly theatricalised death using an overabundance of visual images which Christiane Ndiyae refers to as "baroque" : [5]

Puis, ils ont hissé la Reine autour de la partie la plus
haute de la croix la corde autour du cou.(...)
Et la Reine dont le sourire s'était éteint
Trépassa au bout de la corde, les bras ballants le long du corps
Vêtue d'un pagne de coton blanc orné de fleurs, la
langue pendante et les lèvres bleues
Les seins entourés de colliers de fleurs
Une mousse noire jaillissait de sa bouche teintant ses
guirlandes et son pagne. (155-156)

The Indigenist group was spear headed by ethnologist Jean Price-Mars whose research on the African origins of popular culture and the Vodou religion in particular (Ainsi parla l'oncle, 1928) revolutionized attitudes with regards to Haitian culture, and prepared the way for the "ethnodrama",[6] a term first used by the creator of the psychodrama, J.L. Moreno, but later linked to local religion by psychiatrist Louis Mars, son of Jean-Price Mars [7] and by Frank Fouché. Fouché shifts the discussion of the Vodou religion onto the performance space (Vodou et Théâtre 1976) when he speaks of Vodou as a ritual somewhere between pré-théâtre (that which existed before theatre i.e. forms of ritual whose exclusive function was to operate a form of transformation, or rites of passage) and theatre. [8] Thus we see that Haitian theoreticians and practitioners who emerged from the indigenist tendencies began reinventing performance and dramaturgical categories, creating plays in creole, and producing what Vèvè Clark, Franck Fouché, and others have more recently called the "new Haitian theatre" [9]

In general terms, this new theatre could be described as a richly textured network of divergent forms and practices that fed and continue to feed off each other. This is a clear sign that in spite of adverse political conditions, in spite of the fact that Hervé Denis laments the lack of new plays: "There are not many texts by Haitian playwrights apart from Frankétienne" [10] and in spite of the fact that Maximilien Laroche questions the very existence of Haitian theatre, [11] performance by Haitians, wherever they are, has never ceased to florish. This new theatre of the XX th Century, also saw the rise of institutions such as the Société nationale d'art dramatique (S.N.A.D.), the Conservatoire national d'art dramatique (C.NA.D.), the Institut national de formation artistique (I.N.F.A.) and the Centre haïtien de théâtre, (C.H.I.) associated with the International Theatre Institute (I.T.I.), sponsored by l'U.N.E.S.C.O, all indications of a budding professional theatre milieu, offering professional training to actors, directors and writers. [12]

One of the manifestations of this "new theatre" was the emergence of a body of theoretical work. Manifestos derived from the studies of African culture by Jean Price Mars and more recently from the founding cultural text: "Du réalisme merveilleux des Haïtiens," [13] a penetrating analysis of the "new realism" presented by novelist Jacques Stéphan Alexis at the first International Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris (1956). Alexis defines a poetics of Haitian culture inspired by the Marxist/Leninist conception of social realism, art that contributes to the revolutionary (Socialist) ideal by its choice of subjects related to the daily life of the people, presented in a form that is easily accessible to the masses. Alexis explains that such social realism, if it is reinterpreted in Haitian terms, must relate to the practice of Vodou, a particular religious manifestation which penetrates the daily reality of the Haitian masses. Fouché reiterates Alexis vision of culture, by adapting "Réalisme merveilleux" to his own poetics of theatre, through the theatricalisation of the practice of Vodou.

However, we see that the poetics of the "new theatre" was also open to a diversity of contemporary tendencies and esthetics. Fouché's essay echos the currents of ritual-theatre that had been the focus of experiments in the 1960's and 1970's not only in New York (Julian Beck, Joseph Chaikin) where many Haitians came to live at that period, but also in London (Peter Brook) and in Poland (Jerzy Grotowski),. [14] One could take issue with Fouché on several of his statements, [15], but his discussion of Vodou as "pre-theatre" fore tells the transformation of the Haitian theatre space, its shift from the Italian proscenium arch of the French Classical tradition to the circle and half circle, the hemicycle or the "péristyle", site of rituals of most non western cultures, whose theatre originated in the ritual spaces of the story teller, the sacred dance, and as in the case of Haiti, of the coq fight (the coq pit as Césaire notes in the first pages of La tragédie du roi Christophe) and the Vodou ceremony. Félix Morisseau-Leroy integrated theatricalized versions of these ceremonies into his theatre, Wa Kreyon (Roi Créon), [16] as did Mona Guérin, and even Frankétienne.

However, there is one important difference between Franck Fouchés general conception of the relationship between popular ritual and theatre, and that of the Americans and Europeans. If Peter Brook's theatre appropriates elements of Hindu or African rituals, if Grotowski seeks out the Vodou experience of possession, and if Julian Beck is inspired by Hassidic ceremonies among others, the purpose of the appropriation is to seek "other" experiences by subverting the western theatrical space, and transforming it into a site of cultural and even political protest.

As a result however, their ritual theatre events became a series of "unstable rituals" which, paradoxically , according to Schechner, could not have far reaching effects because the audiences could not recognize these events as their own. [17] The Haitians on the other hand were not trying to liberate themselves from their own culture by adapting elements from foreign cultures. Rather, they were reinterpreting their own popular rituals and integrating them into a recognizable theatrical form in order to confirm the importance of their own culture, of which theatre was an important component.

The Manifesto published by Hervé Denis in 1971 [18], announced the principles upon which the Compagnie Kouidor would define its role in relation to the exiled Haitian population of New York, but in a larger sense, it is a poetics of theatre derived from the more politically oriented brechtian and piscatorian agit / prop tendencies of Julian Beck's ritual-theatre (Beck's companion Judith Malina trained with Piscator before joining the Living Theatre ). By the time Denis published his text (1971), several years before Richard Schechner published his 1976 essays on Ritual and theatre, the most important theatre created by Haitians, was already taking place outside outside Haiti and in the United States.

Haitian theatre beyond the borders

François Duvalier came to power in 1956 and his arrival was a devastating blow to theatre production in the country. Artists, writers and intellectuals, unable to live in his repressive regime were forced to emigrate. The results were various forms of transplanted theatre, which became the sites of intercultural experiments as the stagings absorbed and adapted to the cultures of the host country.

In Paris, Haitian actors were perceived not as Haitian nationals but as part of a population of black actors, assimilated with Africans, Martinicans, Guadeloupeans and other peoples of African origin. Attempts to promote black playwrights and actors in a white dominated society lead to the creation of La Compagnie des Griots in 1956, under the direction of Robert Liensol Haitian actor Gerard Lemoine and singer / actress Toto Bissainthe were both members of the company. Les Griots attained international recognition with its staging of Jean Genet's les Nègres (Théâtre de Lutèce, 1959) under the direction of Roger Blin and later, with their public reading of La tragédie du roi Christophe, an event which preceded Jean-Marie Serreau's full production of Aimé Césaire's play, [19] first staged in 1964 for the Festival of Salzburg. Serreau thus became the other driving force of black theatre in France. He put together his own company of African and Caribbean actors in Paris to work with Aimé Césaire and create what became the founding moment in the stage career of Césaire and the beginning of a professional theatre life for many of these artists. The Haitian members of Serreau's company were Lucien Lemoine, Jacqueline (Scott) Lemoine. [20] and Hervé Denis who went on to co-found Kouidor in New York. At this point, in spite of the activity in France, Haitians were still not agents of their own theatre and the development of an autonomous Haitian theatre only happened in the United States, where the most important nucleus of exogenous Haitian practitioners was eventually able to establish itself, choose its own actors, deal with Haitian themes and perform in creole, thus producing a theatre which spoke directly to the exiled population. Hervé Denis' Manifesto speaks directly to this audience.

Marie-Josée Nzengou-Tayo tells us of Jan Mapou's work with the immigrant community in Miami, and particularly the staging of DPM Kanntè; (available on videocasette). The play is a memorial to Haitians lost at sea between 1991 and 1994, the period between the coup d'état against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his return to power.[21] Working with an amateur company, Mapou conceives an almost naively realistic staging, the sinking of a boatload of people making their way to Miami, which seems to indicate that his primary aim is to create an emotional climate that will cement the community, rather than engage in artistic research.

Also thriving in the U.S.A, and the Caribbean are individual artists such as Max Kénol and Ruddy Sylaire. Kénol founded his own Compagnie théâtrale Max Kénol in New York, but he also performed independently in other productions (i.e. the first performance of Ton beau capitaine de Simone Schwarz-bart, staged in Guadeloupe at the Centre des Arts in Pointe-à-Pitre, by Syto Cavé with Mariann Matheus as the woman) Ruddy Sylaire has appeared at the Ubu Repertory Theater in New York, under the direction of Françoise Kourilsky , founder of the theatre which closed after the events of September 11, 2001. Sylaire is currently in Martinique where he co-founded, with Martinican director José Exélis, the company Les Enfants de la mer. He recently staged Le Prophète, adapted from texts by Khalil Gibran, which was presented at the Chapelle du verb incarné at the Avignon Theatre Festival (2002) and he performed in a recent creole version of Waiting for Godot, [22] staged by Lucette Salibur, artistic director of the Théâtre du Flamboyant in Martinique, which was presented at the 2002 Festival d'été de Fort-de-France. His most recent role is that of a prisoner in a taught two character psychological drama by Maryse Condé, directed by José Exelis: Comme deux frères will be presented at the "off " programme (at the Théâtre du Balcon) of the Avignon Theatre festival in France (July 2007). Sylaire will also be playing the title role in a new staging of Othello by Denis Marleau, current director of the French Theatre of the National Art Centre in Ottawa Canada, this will be a production of the UBU compagnie de création and the National Art Centre French theatre and has been programmed as part of the regular 2007-08 season of the NAC in Ottawa.

However, the Compagnie Kouidor was perhaps the most interesting of all the collective theatre experiences outside the island, certainly the one which had the most impact on the growth of theatre generally in the French and Creole speaking Caribbean. Hervé Denis came to New York to co-found the group with Syto Cavé, and to stage the opening event, Cavé's play Les puits errants, in September 1969 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. [23] Also involved in that first production were Anthony Phelps, Emile Ollivier, Frantz Coulange and Jean Richard Laforest. The occasion was the launching of a record, Pierrot le noir, produced by the group.

Cavé's text integrated fragments of the recorded poetry. To facilitate the transitions between the poetic texts, he included conversations alluding to the current political situation in Haiti. According to the playwright, all through that stage event, the Haitian public, conscious of the subversive nature of the remarks, was very uneasy because they feared reprisals from other Haitian groups living in New York and after the play "you should have seen them rush out and run to the metro stations so as not to be identified" . Obviously, the actors had dared to say in public what the Haitian in the street would only dare to think, and the group's political audacity produced a theatre that attracted much attention. [24]

Hervé Denis'1971 Manifesto, which came out of his Kouidor experience, seeks to define the theatrical poetics of a culture of exile, intended specifically for the Haitians living outside their country. One sees that his vision of theatre is much closer to the ideas of Brecht (and more precisely Le petit organon pour le theatre, L'Arche, 1967, p.9-45) than to those of the Artaudian tendencies of the ritual-theatre movement. To elicit critical responses from the spectators, he proposes a form of performance which is essentially didactic, ideally served by a historical crisis, such as the one experienced by Haitians forced to flee their country. [25] Theatre should recreate images drawn from the daily lives of the people to solidify their attachment to their country of origin, but also to help the audience disengage itself from the fear imposed by the Duvalier regime by developing a national consciousness. The sources of this theatre must be "notre folklore" such as songs, dances, drumming, accompanied by projected images and films but to be effective, local elements must be released from their traditional or sacred context,(Vodou), demythified , and reinscribed into a new mythology corresponding to the narratives of contemporary history. In this dialectical and even intercultural relationship between the stage and the cinema, the past and the present, elements of piscatorian staging that conceived the theatre as a site for forming the masses definitely contributed to a new sense of Haitian nationalism.

The Kouidor experience was perceived as something so revolutionary for the French and Creole speaking Caribbean that Aimé Césaire invited Syto Cavé and the company to present their play La parole des Grands Fonds, at the Festival d'été de Fort-de-France, a Festival created by Césaire in 1972. In 1973. As a result of that first visit, Kouidor had a profound influence on the evolution of theatre in Martinique, where a locally based professional theatre, was on the point of coming into its own. It wasn't until 1982 that Césaire created le Théâtre de la Soif nouvelle (TSN) and Annick Justin-Joseph, the first artistic director of the TSN, admits that her contacts with Syto Cavé and Kouidor had a profound impact on her own vision of staging and actor training. [26]

Frankétienne : Totolomannwèl

Frankétienne enjoys a privileged position in contemporary Haitian theatre because his plays, which appeal to mass audiences as well as to intellectuals, have given drama in creole a new status. His stagings are Rabelaisian like rituals of the popular lower body as theorized by Bakhtin. Curiously enough however, one also finds elements of the highly coded performances that are essential to Asian theatre, the link to his brechtian textual strategies of distanciation. Therefore, his theatre fits into the vocabulary of Brecht in as much as it often refers to the theatrical process in the context of themes that are socially and politically pertinent, producing critical distance on the part of the onlooker. However, it is also Artaudian because of the intense physical responses to his voice and gestures. Attending a Frankétienne performance is something equivalent to attending a raucous religious ceremony. The audience comes in awe and admiration to see the great artist and they are literally assaulted and possessed by this stage presence. One of the instigators of this relation with the audience is his language. Frankétienne has created a form of poetic delirium resembling the avant garde language experiments of Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism. When projected into the performance space, the language becomes a physical stimulant. One example of such a performance is Totolomannwèl. [27]

Although Pèlintèt, an adaptation of Slavomir Mrozek's Les Immigrés dating from 1978, is probably his most performed play because it deals with the question of Haitian immigration, [28] Totolomannwèl, first produced in 1986, is perhaps his strongest statement regarding the situation of the artist in Haïti. The play is a self-referential quest that traces the inner struggle of the poet / playwright caught in a nightmarish experience fuelled by images from the Vodou pantheon.

The artist, forced by a dictator's tribunal to cease writing because his work is considered subversive, finds himself locked away in the dark, haunted by the hallucinations of a deranged mind where images of the "chauffeur from Hell, Baron Samedi" threaten to carry him away to the world of the dead.

Written just after the departure of Baby Doc in February 1986, the play emerges at a perfect brechtian moment, one of historical and social crisis as the Duvalier regime comes abruptly to an end. Frankétienne mirrors his own existence through the character of the artist, Bolo Bèlom, accompanied by his double who performs the artist on stage in a series of mises en abyme , violent confrontations between the playwright and his oppressor. The poet conjures up apocalyptic scenarios where terrifying creatures attempt to drive the artist mad, until, the playwright, conscious of the therapeutic power of his own creative activity, gathers new strength and finds himself lifted upwards towards the sun by the "Spiralist" [29] forces of light , and carried towards a final gesture of revolt and eventually survival.

In the cosmogony of Frankétienne's personal universe, Totolomannwèl becomes a metaphor for a space of internal exile, a damp dark unidentified space of the lower depths where the artist has been held prisoner by the tyrant for the past 12 years. In order to avoid madness, he must engage in creative activity non stop. This theatre then is fore grounded as a survival strategy. The actor Bolo Bèlom, creates visions and scenarios out of his fears, his fantasies, his hallucinations, while his double performs these fantasmatic images by manipulating props and elements of clothing, shifting appearances, changing his voice to incarnate the confrontation between the artist and all the oppressive forces that have locked him into his nightmare of psychic and physical isolation.

The play was created as a dialogue but it became a monologue when Frankétienne assumed all the roles in a creole version presented in Boston in 1996. The published French language version, presented as a monologue in French for the first time, entitled Foukifoura (2000), reveals some basic structural differences with the monologue version in creole, available on video-tape. [30] Frankétienne's double versions of texts in French and Creole (translations or adaptations?) constitute one of the trademarks of his writing. Since language is the repository of a whole symbolic system that cannot be ignored, this movement between languages reveals the depth of the psychic schism which splits his own consciousness, illustrated here by the Bèlom / actor-double character. The earlier French version from 1986 which was first performed in Port-au-Prince (which precedes Foukifoura) makes the split explicit by putting two actors on stage (one plays Bolo Bèlom the actor/poet, the other plays his double who performs all the other voices in this theatre within theatre, including the power-hungry despot, ). The Creole version conceived for a single actor, (Frankétienne) was first performed in Boston and it was the first time Frankétienne performed one of his own plays as a monologue on stage. The text speaks of Bèlom the single character who incarnates the tensions and rotten relations in a country "divided within itself", a country in the process of self-destructing by its "fratricide" impulses, " a single body torn apart" that can never become a whole. The vision of an inner sickness is even more powerful in creole. What also emerges more forcefully in creole is the pathological dialectics of power as a metatheatrical performance within a performance, seen as a transposition of the crisis of possession borrowed from the Vodou ceremony. Bèlom/Frankétienne's staging of the tyrant through an ever changing body, and a face that transforms itself like a living mask, takes us through the process of evolving power relations and at each step, his performance has physical repercussions on the spectators, repercussions that will take possession of the stage in the final scenes.

On a sparse set - lampshades, boxes, a chair and a bed, suggesting the backstage of a theatre - Bolo Bèlom sings to the audience that he is the artist, driven to the brink of madness by those who persecute him. However the artist does realizes that by acting out the horrors inflicted upon him, he recovers agency and can set in motion his own process of inner liberation. First, the artist shows us a theatre reflecting his own paranoia. He fears "they" are spying on him, "they" have put evil spells on him, he is terrified by the wind, thinks he hears rats knawing at the walls. The disturbing images move out of the personal sphere and into the public sphere as his own Totolomannwèl becomes a microcosm of present day Haiti. He conjures up images of death and destruction around him, people dying in the streets, great tempests of dirt and blood , people ripped to shreds, animals eating human remains, the place is a slaughter house. Actually, newspaper accounts that followed the departure of Baby Doc speak exactly of such scenes : corpses left rotting in the streets to be eaten by pigs and dogs.

This apocalyptic scenario is produced not only by the semantic content of his words but also by the physical production of sound, the phatic elements of language, and its impact on the body, an indication that his text is deeply rooted in oral traditions where meaning is produced by all manner of extra linguistic elements. His long lists of repetitive sounds, clusters of onomatopoeia that growl and hiss, evoking violence and anger, create meaningful sound scapes that transform the voice into a corporeal organ as the artist speaks, dances and moves around the stage. The cosmogony of the Spiralist movement is incarnated in the actor's body. It becomes the battleground of a Manichean relation, where forces of good and evil confront each other from within and without, until the artist is able to disengage himself and ascend towards illumination as the monster politician is swallowed into the darkness of confusion, paranoia and self doubt. His fall is shown in progressively declining steps.

The Tyrant begins by assuming his power through acts of seduction, gestures and statements alluding to his superior masculinity i.e. virility, made all the more powerful as he erases the virility of the artist. The oppressor is the one with the huge puffed out chest, the swivelling hips, and the sexual thrusting, the "koutfouk"; he advances with his legs wide apart indicating his exceptionally big "gwen" - his face frozen in a live masque of cruelty intended to frighten those who gaze upon it, similar to the coded movements of the Japanese Kabuki tradition. On the other hand, , the artist is described as a hairless (spineless) creature, "sans pwel", "gwen krazé" (crushed balls), enculé, baisé, effeminate and skinny, a fellow whose physical impotence is equated with producing worthless theatre that no one understands : "Akatemshit", "pyesteat", "pimanbouk".

The oppressor begins to parody Artaud, reinterpreting "total theatre" as his own living theatre of torture : the blows of the torturers, the cries of the victims and long lists of dangerous instruments, are sources of sadistic pleasure, sexual stimulants and music to his ears : " nails", " knives", "scissors", "sand paper", "razors, "acid" , followed by a few bars from Beethoven's fifth Symphony suggesting images of Nazi concentration camps where orchestras played as the inmates were marched off to the gas chambers. The chain of analogies creates a network of evil, made all the more nerve-racking when the torturer himself is associated with current Haitian street gangs who have taken their designations from the realm of Vodou spirits of the night : "lougarou", " solokotò", " blengbeding", "gran makout", " bizango". Also in keeping with elements of Vodou, this sadist lives a delirium of total power. Similar to the Vodou Houngan (priest), the Tyrant believes he is invincible : "I am stronger and more courageous than the wind, than all the criminals. Nothing can happen to me," "My word is power, my silence is power, my gaze is power". From this heightened state of excitement he then recedes into delusions of persecution, babbling confessions of self hate and repulsion exacerbated by morbid hallucinations. He hears the souls of his victims, his hands are tainted with blood. He fears those who will poison him to usurp his power.

As the tyrant flounders, the artist, in an opposing movement, removes his actors costume, steps outside the performance and begins his ascent towards liberation, which takes the form of a sudden direct appeal to the audience. Here we see that the Spiralist dynamics also finds its equivalent in the corresponding cyclical time frame which structures the play, a circular time/space that recalls the cosmogony of African history. The play which began with an official tribunal condemning the artist because of his subversive writings, closes with a popular tribunal, calling for the monsters who rule the country to admit their crimes and account for their actions, as a voice of doom from the upper echelons of the universe announces that the truth will be revealed , that those who raped and pillaged will be judged. The audience, cheering and clapping, realizes that something important has happened, a form of collective transfiguration has united all those present in a common political consciousness.

Mimi Barthélémy : Une très belle mort

A theatrical nomad, Mimi Barthélémy , story teller, actor, writer, epitomizes the creative response of an artist for whom theatre represents, among other things, a transcultural dialogue. She is the ambassador of Haitian culture roaming the world, gathering her folk tales, integrating new forms of performance by collaborating with artists from France, Guadeloupe, Mali, United States and Colombia. [31]

Une très belle mort, which I saw at Greg Germain's Chapelle du verbe incarné, was one of the "off" Avignon productions of that year (2001). Written and performed by Mimi and her artist daughter, Elodie Barthélémy, the play / story-telling event was staged by the Colombian filmmaker and theatre director Nicolas Buenaventura Vidal, son of the founder of the Teatro experimental de Cali, Enrique Buenaventura. The elder Buenaventura developed new forms of physical and improvisational theatre which have obviously left their mark on his son, because he brought to the verbal story telling a choreography which transformed the event into a corporeal theatre experience.

The principal narrative was inspired by an encounter with a 100 year old friend of Mimis father who, after listening to the story of the father's death, commented : "such a beautiful death. I would like to die that way". [32] This encounter became the opening remarks of her narrative, which emerged from a fictional space created by the voices of the pink Flamingo and the old Iguana , two figures of the animal world who meet on the edge of a pond in a liminal space of "magical" happenings, suggested by the border between Haiti and Santo Domingo. While these conversations take place downstage, we see her daughter Elodie upstage, bent over the ground drawing. Using a fine white sand which pours from between her nimble fingers, she creates a huge oval shaped form resembling a vévé. Traditionally, these are the signs which call up the invisible Loas, inviting them to take possession of the faithful during the Vodou ceremony. Here however, in this secular performance, the vévé are only visual suggestions of the original, thus they lose their religious significance but acquire the status of a new process of meaning production. They emerge as a hybrid form produced by the interpenetration of hieroglyphics taken from several cultures - Persian, Mayan, Chinese. Just as the vévé loses its original meaning, these hieroglyphics, plucked out of their original sign systems also become hermetic symbols that take us into the world of abstract art, similar to the one that we find in the paintings by Paul Klee, or Kandinsky. But, associated with oral story telling, they indicate an interesting new link between written language and non written language. The writing body of the artist and the speaking / moving body of the story teller meet on stage and produce a spacial text through two a corporeal performances : the act of drawing / writing, and the act of storytelling.

Elodie, the artist, also becomes an actor, reproducing the voices of an invisible public that would normally intervene during the story telling ritual where all present become participants. She produces phatic noises of approval or pleasure, by commenting events, making the presence of human spectators felt, through her sounds.

From the narrative perspective, this performance produces three simultaneous time / space relations. Apart from the fictional space of the Iguana and the Flamingo, Mimi Barthélémy creates "the Space of the Story Teller and the actress". Here, she becomes the story teller who incarnates her many tales in front of an audience, using a variety of performance strategies.

This is the space where she worked most closely with director Nicolas Vidal . Lighting effects, body movement and the judicious use of props sculpted the performance space and transformed the oral world of the "conte" into the material world of the stage through a gallery of characters taken from Guadeloupean and Haitian folktales.

Finally, somewhere between this imaginary theatre space of the folk tale and that of the principal narrative of the Flamingo and the Iguana where Mimi also integrates stories about her father, there appears a third space. Here, the actress steps out of the story-telling mise en abyme, assumes her own voice, speaks directly to the audience, tells about her own life as she dialogues with the spirits of her uncle and her father from beyond the grave. As is the way with the story teller, he / she is supposed to move freely between the living and the dead, the invisible and the visible, the present the past, and the future.

The actress performs primarily in French although one notes that her French is closer to a form of "interlanguage", where one detects traces of creole in the rhythm, the intonation, the pronunciation . As Mimi said, "I don't normally tell my stories in creole but I find that the marriage between the two languages has produced something lovely (...) My intention is to give Haitians the impression that I am speaking créole, and to the French that I am speaking a French which is not quite theirs but which is a language they understand immediately".

Both of these artist represent works that constitute the new canon of Haitian theatre : playwrights who are also actors, familiar with the traditions of the western stage as well as with the secular and religious traditions of Haiti, artists for whom Creole, if not always the language of performance, at least lurks somewhere in the background. Their work shows the way Haitian theatre has flourished both within the country and without, producing a stage craft that has universal appeal because it is driven by modern concepts of theatricality, while remaining close to sources of local culture whether they be current political crises or traditional elements of Vodou and story telling. Both Frankétienne and Mimi Barthélémy show that the ethnodrama has become a hybrid form of contemporary theatre, proof that the theatre which "gives form to social relations on stage" sought by Maximilien Laroche, does, in fact, exist. What characterizes those relations in theatrical terms, is the new ethnodramatic rhetoric of continuing instability, of constantly shifting human relations, a theatre of disruption and upheaval, where boundaries between languages, places, and performance traditions never cease to be questioned precisely because the multiple Haitian societies are places of disruption, tension, and instability. In spite of the material hardships, the dialogue between society and theatre is very definitely taking place. What is lacking is the research and critical work to help us understand the nature of this dialogue.

This is a revised version of an article published under the same title in études théâtrales / Essays in Theatre, 20-.1 (November, 2001), p 51-66.

Notes:

My thanks to Rodney Saint-Eloi, journalist, theatre critic, director / fondateur des Editions Mémoire d'encrier,. Our discussions were invaluable.

[1]
Robert Cornevin. Le théâtre haitien des origines à nos jours. Montréal: Leméac, 1973. See as well, Gary Victor. "Haïti, an overview." World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre. Ed. Don Rubin, 2, Routledge, 1996, 297-303

[2]
Auguste Emile Nau,. Histoire des Caciques d'Haïti. Port-au-Prince, 1855

[3]
Anacaona de Jean Métellus was given a staged reading at the Théâtre national populaire (Palais de Chaillot) in 1985, directed par Antoine Vitez. The play was published by Hatier in 1986.

[4]
We are referring to the works by Aimé Césaire: La tragédie du roi Christophe, Une saison au Congo and Vincent Placoly: Dessalines ou la passion de l'indépendance, from Martinique. See Marie-Agnès Sourieau. "Dramaturgie et histoire: la construction de Dessalines de Vincent Placoly." L'Annuaire théâtral, Revue québécoise d'études théâtrales,.28 ( 2000): 44 -58.

[5]
Christiane Ndiaye. "Anacaona de Jean Métellus: une tragédie caribéenne en paroles baroques". Les théâtres francophones et créolophones de la Caraïbe. Ed. Alvina Ruprecht, Paris: L'Harmattan, 2003, p. 99-110.

[6]
More recently, l'ethnopsychoanalyst Tobie Nathan co-wrote a play with Isabelle Stengers and Lucien Hounkpatin: La damnation de Freud, staged by Guadelopean actor/director Greg Germain at the Chapelle du Verbe incarné during the Avignon Theatre Festival, July 2001 and performed at the Festival again this year (2002). The encounter between Freudian psychotherapy and traditional Yoruba curing rituals questions the superiority of Western psychoanalysis. The term "ethnodrama" was first associated with religion, and particularly Vodou ceremonies by Louis Mars whose ethnopsychiatric observations of the possessed during the Vodou ceremony emphasize the psychosocial and therapeutic role of this type of ritual within the peasant community. Corporeal techniques such as singing, dancing, mime, as well as masked movement leading to trance and possession are the specific modes of expression of the ethnodrama. See Michel Corvin. "Ethnodrame". Dictionnaire encyclopédique du théâtre. II, A-K, Paris: Larousse, 1995, 614-616; André. Schaeffner, first uses the term. Fouché quotes the introduction to Guy Dumur's book Histoire des spectacles, referring to Schaeffner's notion that the religious ceremonies of the pre-Colombian and ancient Egyptian civilisations could be called a Apré-théâtre. See Franck Fouché. Vodou et théâtre. Pour un nouveau théâtre populaire. Montréal: Editions Nouvelle Optique, 1976, 47; André Schaeffner,"Rituel et pré-théâtre", Histoire des spectacles. Ed. Guy Dumur. Paris, Gallimard, La Pléiade, 1965.

[7]
"Quant au Vaudou, il en est resté au stade de la religion dramatique ou de l'ethnodrame comme je l'appelle, attendant encore son Eschyle, son Euripide", Louis Mars, quoted from Cornevin. op.cit., 190.

[8]
Frank Fouché. op.cit.: 45 - 68

[9]
Vèvè Clark. "When Womb Waters Break: Emergence of Haitian New Theatre 1953-1987", Callaloo, Haiti, the Literature and Culture 15.II (1992): 778-786; Franck Fouché, op.cit.;

[10]
"Max Dominique, Entretien avec Hervé Denis", Conjonction, 207, (2001): 118. This was the last interview given by Hervé Denis before his death in May 2002.

[11]
"Il existe des dramaturges haïtiens. Par contre, il est moins certain qu'il existe un théâtre haïtien. Le théâtre exige une mise en scène, une poétique de la représentation du visible". Maximilien Laroche. "Roye, les voilà!de Mona Guérin. à propos de la naissance du théâtre haïtien.", Le Théâtre Francophone et créolophone de la Caraïbe. op.cit., p.85-98.

[12]
At the present time however, it appears that the material status of theatre leaves much to be desired. Frankétienne describes the conditions under which he produces his plays : "We are forced to create our own productions and so I am a jack-off-all-trades. I write my plays, I stage my plays, I do the publicity, sell the tickets, and look after the money. I rent the spaces which are disgusting (exécrable) because the acoustics are bad, there is no lighting, there is nothing". (My translation of comments made during the conference on Francophone and Creolophone theatres, organized by the Centre d'analyse des langues et des littératures des Amériques (CALIFA, Carleton University), held at the Theatre Department of the University of Ottawa, October, 1997.). During a round table discussion published in the Haitian journal Conjonction. 207 (2002): 93-104, the young generation of stage practitioners states that subsidies are no longer available for producing plays, there is no more actor training, theatre is in a state of crisis. According to Frankétienne, the public is even afraid to go out at night because of the "zenglendos", " the gangs who rape and kill"(op. cit.). Florence Jean Louis Dupuy, one of this younger generation presented her play Mariela ou l'arène des sans-bas at the Festival Teyat Zabim (Guadeloupe) in May 2002 and then at La Chapelle du verbe incarné at Avignon, 2002

[13]
Jacques Stéphan Alexis. "Du merveilleux réalisme des haïtiens" Présence africaine, numéro spécial; le 1er Congrès international des écrivains et artistes noirs, (Paris - 19-22 septembre , 1956), (juin-novembre, 1956): 245-271

[14]
The fact that the theatre group Kouidor, founded by the Haitians in exile in New York, came into being in 1969 at the height of these ritual-theatre experiences, was also extremely revealing. It was at this time that, according to Syto Cavé , Jerzy Grotowski became interested in the experience of possession by the Loa and his visit to Haiti has been documented by several theatre specialists. It was obvious that the psychophysiological transfiguration experienced by the participant during the Vodou ceremony , represented the sacred moment Grotowski was searching for through his own kind of syncretic corporeal theatre where the body becomes the site of transformation after it has been "purified" by the Via Negativa. Grotowski met with Thérèse Roumer and Tiga, the creators of the movement Saint-Soleil in Haiti. He took part in Vodou ceremonies himself, and later invited the Haitians to perform their rituals in his Theatre Laboratory in Wroclaw. (Telephone conversation with Syto Cavé, Port-au-Prince, 28 January, 1999). For documented inforrmation concerning the theatre des "sources" which concerned the practice of Vodou directly, see Robert Findlay, Haline Filipowicz, " Grotowsky's Laboratory Theatre: Dissolution and Diaspora", The Drama Review, v.35, n.1 (printemps 1991), p. 95-112, et Zbigniew Osinski, "Grotowski Blazes the Trails. From Objective Drama to Ritual Arts", The Drama Review, v.35, n.1 (Printemps 1991), p. 95-112.

[15]
Within western theatrical discourses, the link between theatre and ritual is associated with Artaud's call for the appropriation of non western rituals to transform western culture. Integrating these cultural manifestations that produce deep seated spiritual, psychic and physical change on the human being during a long corporeal process would cure a culture / theatre that had become too separated from the essence of human existence. Such a theatre is deemed to be "sacred" as Peter Brook has well explained. The Western theatre performances of mixed origin, (those of Jerzy Grotowski or of Julian Beck) that are inspired by the dynamics of ritual as well as by aesthetic considerations, (as defined by Richard Schechner), came to be known as "ritual-theatre". One might say then that what Schaeffner and Fouché refer to as "pre-theatre" is perhaps something closer to non western rituals (religious or secular) that are the basic elements of the process-oriented non western theatre, (Pekin Opera, Noh , Kabuki, Indian dance dramas etc) cleansed of the western gaze which has a tendency to see all "real" theatre as a discrete moment of logocentric and/or mimetic art observed by a passive audience. As a footnote, it was the healing rituals of the Tarahumara in Mexico that were the most important models of the ritual dynamics applied by Artaud to western theatre, not the progress of the Balinese dancer as Fouché mentions. (79) It is generally accepted now in artaudian scholarship that Artaud's reading of the Balinese dance traditiion was a misinterpretation because he assumed that the Balinese actor / dancer was being manipulated by an invisible power, whereas Asian performance is the result of a long, arduous, highly coded process learned as a way of life.

[16]
The first Haitian playwright to produce theatre in creole: Feliks Moriso-Lewa, "Wa Kreyon", Teyat kreyol. Delmas:Haïti, 1997. For Mona Guérin, see Maximilien Laroche, note. 11.

[17]
Richard Schechner. "From Ritual to Theatre and Back. The Structure / Process of the Efficacy-Entertainiment Dyad." Essays on Performance Theory 1970-1976. New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1977, 86.

[18]
Hervé Denis. "Document. Introduction à un manifeste pour un théâtre haïtien." Nouvelle optique 1.1 (1971): 132- 141.

[19]
Roger Blin explains how he missed the chance to stage La tragédie du roi Christophe with Les Griots, in an interview entitled, "Les Nègres. Jean Genet, octobre 1959 - Lutèce" Roger Blin. Souvenirs et propos recueillis par Lynda Bellity Peskine. Paris: Gallimard, 1986, 124- 151. A recent interview with Ghislaine Gadjard (Paris, March 2007) reveals the important role played by Serreau in the fostering of theatre companies and in the training of actors in Martinique and in Guadeloupe.

[20]
Lucien Lemoine. Douta Seck ou La tragédie du roi Christophe. Dakar: Présence Africaine, 1993. Lemoine came to Dakar with the cast of La tragédie du roi Christophe in 1966 and he remained there with his wife, Jacqueline, also an actress in the company. Together they created the Atelier de recherche et de pratiques théâtrales, a drama centre in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Cheikh Anta Diop, Dakar where he continues to act and direct plays. See Entracte, revue théâtrale annuelle. Presses Universitaires de Dakar.

[21]
Marie-José N'Zengou-Tayo. " La Migration populaire haïtienne au théâtre : Pèlintèt de Frankétyèn et DPM Kanntè de Jan Mapou." Les théâtres francophones et créolophones de la Caraïbe : Ed. Alvina Ruprecht, L'Harmattan,p.111-134, Jan Mapou. DPM Kanntè (Téyat total). Miami: Koleksyon Koukouy. Sosyete Koukouy, 1996.

[22]
The creole translation of Godot is by Monchoachi. Ruddy Sylaire collaborated with Françoise Kourilsky to create a montage of Aimé Césaire's poeme: Cahiers d'un retour au pays natal. Françoise remembers their collaboration : "Tout ce que je peux dire c'est que Ruddy et moi nous étions dans un état de grâce l'un avec l'autre", Interview with Françoise Kourilsky, New York, 1 February, 1999.

[23]
Hervé Denis returned to Paris in 1972 to work with Jean-Marie Serreau in Le printemps des Bonnets Rouges ou la révolte des Bretons contre Louis XIV, by Paol Keineg. Denis remained there until Serreau's death in 1973. Upon returning to Haiti, he was invited to stage plays at the Théâtre national, before creating his own theatre : la Compagnie Hervé Denis. In 1989, Denis staged his version of La tragédie du roi Christophe and the play toured North America, including Montreal where it was performed at the UQAM. We will always remember Hervé Denis as an imposing Roi Christophe and the late Lobo Dyabavadra, who gave a particularly noteworthy performance as Hugonin, the "fou du roi".

[24]
Syto Cavé, op. cit. Cavé staged the original production of Ton beau capitaine, at the Centre des Arts, Pointe -à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, in May 1987, as part of the theatre festival organised by Michèle Montantin, director of the Centre d'action culturelle (CAC).

[25]
Syto Cavé op.cit.

[26]
Interview with Annick Justin Joseph, Fort-de-France, Martinique, 23 July, 1998.

[27]
The monlogue version of Totolomannwèl in Creole is available on video-cassette, filmed before a Haitian audience in Boston (1996).

[28]
Performed among other places in Montreal, May 2000 with Frankétienne (Polidò) and Ricardo Lefèvre (Piram) See article by Marie-Josée N'Zengou-Tayo, op. cit.

[29]
For more details about Frankétienne's notion of "Spiralisme" see "Imaginaires et parcours poétiques" discussion with Robert Berrouët-Oriol and Robert Fournier, Poétiques et imaginaires, Francopolyphonie littéraire des Amériques. Ed. Pierre Laurette, Hans-George Ruprecht. Paris: L'Harmattan, 1995, 47-68.

[30]
My quotations are all taken from the taped version in creole.

[31]
For a complete bibliography see Christiane Makward, "Oyez Ayiti! De Mimi Barthélémy", Writing under Siege. Haitian Literature 1804-2004. Ed. Kathleen Balutansky, Maris-Agnès Soureau. Rodopi, p. 349-360.

[32]
References are taken from several sources : a) Her performance at the Avignon Festival, July 2001, b) an interview with Mimi Barthélémy and her daughter Elodie Barthélémy, Avignon, July13, 2001, c) "La Chapelle du verbe incarné : Les théâtres de la France d'outre-mer, entre Avignon et le "Black Atlantic" in Uncertain Relations: Some configurations of the "Third Space" in Francophone writings of the Americas and of Europe, (Ed.) Rachel Killick, Coll, Modern French identities, Oxford/Berlin, Peter Lang, 2005, p. 155-178.

This is a revised version of the article that was originally published in études théâtrales / Essays in Theatre, 20-.1 (November, 2001), p 51-66.

Alvina Ruprecht