Embodying Dantò, Performing Freda, Dancing Lasirenn: Yonel Charles's Choreographic Elaborations of Ezili

The cohort of Ezili spirits function as diverse feminine principles through which we can understand the dance and activist work of Yonel Charles, a self-identified masisi (gay male) performer and LGBTQ centerpost in Jacmel, Haiti. Through an analysis of Charles's solo performance and collective care of LGBTQ Haitians in Jacmel, I argue that he mobilizes Ezili's complex feminine and feminist principles as vital knowledge. Ezili Freda, Ezili Dantò, and Lasirenn, in particular, underscore the ways in which Charles does his work in the world, and I articulate Charles's performances of the everyday and the theatrical as elaborations of Ezilian principles that illuminate her inherent queer feminist potentials. As such, Ezili knowledge becomes a dynamic set of lived principles through which to fashion one's complex, nonconforming body and community, so urgently necessary for a precarious and hostile world.