‍ ‍Enfleshing the Void: Archiving the Black Kin-Aesthesis of Haitian Vodou in George Balanchine’s Agon (Doctoral Thesis)

This dissertation restores symmetrical historiographic balance to the dances of Haiti and the African diaspora with those of Europe and the West by offering “critical enfleshment” and “Black kin-aesthesis” as theoretical tools to help fill the voids in Western dance historiographies. Most Western historiographies of Western dance forms, like ballet, tell a story that not only omits the substantial influences of non-Western cultures on ballet, but they also discredit the tools that those cultures use to tell their own histories.

Critical enfleshment, like Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation,” fills these voids in Western archives by following how people of African descent used Black kin-aesthesis to transcend their flesh and their oppressive conditions through a hyper engagement with their flesh. This process accesses higher forms of knowing and subsequently transmits this wisdom and historical information to others through the flesh.

I place George Balanchine’s ballet, Agon (1957), in dialogue with the enfleshed archives of the Rada, Gede, and Petwo Rites of Haitian Vodou captured in Maya Deren’s archival footage in her documentary Divine Horsemen (1951) to explore how Balanchine uses Haitian ritual dance steps to evoke the early modern French court. I re-historicize both Agon and early modern dances like the Sarabande by centering Afro-diasporic cosmologies and perspectives and detailing how the shared landscape of the transatlantic slave trade and colonial practices made the consumption of Afro-diasporic practices into those of Europe inevitable. Each chapter places the literary and danced traditions of the West in dialogue with those of the African diaspora and shows how they meet in Agon. Black enfleshment through the hands, spine, and hips are archives that house the cosmological, compositional, and philosophical themes I explore throughout this dissertation and organize each chapter.

To open the investigation, I focus on the Western cultural landscape surrounding Haiti that fostered the racial anxieties central to Agon and Agon’s twentieth century literary sources by comparing these sources cosmologically, compositionally, and philosophically to the Rada and Gede Rites in chapter 1. The Petwo Rites that fueled the cultural anxieties, love, and resistance movements that are central to the “black hand touch(ing) white skin” in Agon’s “Pas-de-Deux” and it’s under researched connection to Emmett Till are explored in chapter 2. Chapter 3 explores the vertical spine, spirals, and ritual geometries as an essential quality in the salutes and trio configurations of the Rada Rites and Balanchine’s trios in his inner movements.

The concluding chapter explores the Gede Rite’s Banda dance and grieving mothers in Geoffrey Holder’s “Banda” that connects the network of modern and early modern exchanges between the African continent, the Caribbean, North America, and Europe to reveal diasporic kinship ties between the Haitian Banda and other dance forms like the Sarabanda in Cuba, Zarabanda in Spain, and appropriated as Sarabande in France before becoming Agon’s “Saraband-Step.” Taken together, this dissertation reveals Agon to be a ballet that dances an historical restoration, with Africanist practices at its center. Not in the way of restorative dance practice that looks only to “restore” or “preserve” an idealized White narcissistic history of European court culture devoid of the presence of other cultures, but a demonstration of how several cultures contributed to ballet’s history.