Manbo Ayizan on a New York Stage: How Roxane D'Orléans Juste Danced Women's Movement Intelligence

This intimate diaristic article illuminates how lauded modern/contemporary dancer Roxane D'Orléans Juste resourcefully tapped into what she terms "movement intelligence" to embody a priestess who channeled the divine in the 2014 choreography She Who Carries the Sky. Inspired in part by Edwidge Danticat's book Breath, Eyes, Memory, D'Orléans Juste became the spiritual realm's conduit through what she calls "knowing and sensing with the body, allowing environments and people to be mutually affective, and drawing from this knowledge to thread movements that animate the message the body projects." Born in Québec to a French Canadian mother and a Haitian father, the performer underwent rigorous training in dance and academic studies in Haiti, Canada, the United States, and Europe, becoming a staple of the United States' prestigious Limón Dance Company from 1983 to 2016. D'Orléans Juste was the company's associate artistic director when she devised the piece with McIntyre. Limón's then artistic director Carla Maxwell commissioned the choreography for D'Orléans Juste to commemorate her thirty-year tenure with the company.

In recreating D'Orléans Juste's method for initiating a choreographed, embodied movement practice for the stage that sources and routes Haitian cultural memory on a personal level, this article also tends to the primary concerns of her work. It mobilizes the artist's emic term "movement intelligence" in describing her process of researching, rehearsing, and performing She Who Carries the Sky as a representation of the physical and intellectual ingenuity sourced by Haitian diasporic arts practitioners as they lead culturally engaged and multidirectional lives. Accordingly, the article is deeply attentive to the dance's references and allusions for readers and viewers of the choreography's future iterations; it follows D'Orléans Juste's insistence that a Haitian woman's creative and spiritual methods for moving through spaces, times, and sociocultural knowledge constitute acts of self-determination, alchemized with finesse and careful and sustained labor. To articulate the artist's efforts to create new memories and broaden perceptions of Haitianness for her audiences, I use Haitian and Vodou epistemologies as interpretive lenses that explicate how D'Orléans Juste's contemporary dancing body challenges the investment some readers and viewers––of Haitian descent and otherwise––might have in a specific traditional construct of dance in Haiti and its diasporic spaces.