How can the legacy of Haitian voudoun, urban dances and experimental film affect a performative process? In Divine Cypher, Afro-Brazilian choreographer, dancer and visual artist Ana Pi has a dialogue with 20th-century avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren, as well as with her mentor Katherine Dunham, known as the queen mother of black dance. Deren and Dunham did several years of research into the dance culture in Haiti, which became a radical turn in their artistic practices. A new way of thinking, the relationship between the body and the camera, a book and hours of recording for one, for the other the creation of a dance technique that would transform the future of choreography. In The Divine Cypher, in a dreamed and danced conversation with Deren and Dunham, Pi looks at how these movements resonate today and what remains of these holy ritual dances. Which gestures survived as elements of current dances? The circular Haitian dances are echoed in the cyphers, the battleground inside a circle, of street dance. In this exquisite solo, Ana Pi interweaves the sacred and the everyday, tradition and the present, collective and individual memory.
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