The religion of Haitian Vodou has always created a challenge regarding representation. Vodou is magick and mystery. The practices include song, dance, art, and trance-formation. How does one attempt to describe these things to others ? This difficult question is the subject of the recently released work Defiant Itineraries by Lydia Platon Lazaro.
This book primarily focuses on the legacy of two women : Maya Deren and Katherine Dunham. Regular readers of this blog know how important I feel both these women were as both artists and academics. They were anthropologists, filmmakers, dancers, and scholars.
Katherine Dunham went on to become a legend in the dance world, crafting the Dunham technique and sharing it with the world. Here Lazaro talks about her contributions to the study of Vodou, mainly in the form of performance. Performance is situated here as a counter-narrative to Eurocentric representations and labeling. Of particular interest here is Lazaro’s descriptions and analysis of the ritual dance the Yanvalou. She writes ” Dunham’s signature training technique included a flexible back and relaxed knees, taken directly from the yenvalou…, the dance she mastered as part of her initiation in her Vodou marriage to the serpent god Dambala. ” The dance mimics Dambala/Damballa’s serpent-like movements but also speaks of resistance, like much of Dunham’s work.
Katherine Dunham on Dance, Vodou, and Film
Defiant Itineraries also speaks extensively about Maya Deren. Best known for her experimental films, Deren was in fact a Vodou priestess who dedicated much of her life to chronicling the religion. The book brings up the question of race, and Deren’s participation in a religion that has traditionally been one of people of color. Lazaro writes ” Deren… proposes the notion of a possible erasure of difference through the perspective of ritual aesthetic. Her films and ‘experimental’ outlook address the body and the gaze in a different language that questions markings of race, gender, and class in cinema.” I find it fascinating that in the end Deren struggled with these representations herself. Unable to edit the film footage she shot in Haiti to her liking, the material was instead edited posthumously. Much of what she discovered on that trip was instead presented in Deren’s book Divine Horseman.
Maya Deren – Excerpt from Her Haitian Vodou Footage
Lydia Platon Lazaro received her PhD from the University of Puerto Rico, where she currently teaches. Her book Defiant Itineraries is an in-depth look at the practices and scholarship of Katherine Dunham and Maya Deren specifically as they relate to American film. While very comprehensive, this is a textbook and is not for beginners. However for those looking for serious works about Vodou, as it is represented on film in particular, I highly recommend it. Vodou dance on film was part of my graduate work at NYU and I truly appreciate Lazaro’s commitment to an underrepresented topic. If you have enjoyed what you read here please help us out and share, share, share !
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