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The Epitome of Black Self-Regard: Vodou modernity and queer movement in Prodigal Prince

– Alexis White

In 1968, Geoffrey Holder staged Prodigal Prince, an homage to Hector Hyppolite, the “father” of Haitian painting who was also an houngan (or vodou priest). After his initial exposure to Haitian dance at the 1952 Caribbean Festival of the Arts in Puerto Rico and his engagement with dancers working in Haiti, like Katherine Dunham, Holder collected Haitian art and incorporated vodou epistemology-as-movement throughout his life. The loose narrative of the one-act ballet is purportedly drawn from one of Hyppolite’s perhaps apocryphal tales from 1943—the artist was known to spin a web—in which the vodou lwa (or spirits) Erzulie and St. John the Baptist appeared to him in a vision and prophesied that a man from far away would make him famous after buying his paintings. In fact, this vision would prove true twice over: In 1944 the American DeWitt Peters founded the Centre d’Art with Hyppolite as a central figure, a moment marked as the “renaissance” of modern Haitian art. One year later, André Breton visited Haiti and purchased a number of Hyppolite’s works and folded him into the surrealist canon. Painting informs Holder’s choreography, or, as the critic Clive Barnes wrote in 1970, “few works have so vividly conveyed the texture and feel of paintings.” This essay takes Barnes’s assessment as a point of departure to interrogate Holder’s transmedial exploration of Caribbean modernity through the queer syncretism of vodou. Prodigal Prince is often characterized as a “fusion” or “blending” of ballet, modern, and African diasporic (specifically Haitian vodou) dance. While this basic characterization is correct, it fails to fully elucidate the interaction between and across the aesthetic registers of different movement traditions. Rather than perpetuate a flattened language of fusion largely limited to dance, this essay focuses on two distinct dialogues of syncretism between tradition and modernity that can be traced in the interaction of dance, music, and costuming.

First, the blurred distinction between ballet, modern, and African diasporic dance should be at least partially understood as the result of the cosmopolitan dance world Holder had become ingrained in in New York. The visual and auditory drive of the piece rests heavily on sudden formal changes in tempo. For instance, the soundtrack steps between the ponderousness of a Gregorian Chant (Ave Maria in the 1998 revival), a lilting creole melody, and the polyrhythm of vodou drumming. There are also striking shifts between slow and fast movements, a characteristic of Caribbean dance highlighted by Katharine Dunham’s anthropological staging practices. This aspect of changing the speed and intensity of dance adds a layer of complexity to the simple identification of Western and African influences in Prodigal Prince. Although recognizable ballet steps appear seamlessly throughout, some of what appears to be modern dance in the way of Graham or Horton technique are clearly slowed-down African steps. Complicating or obscuring the distinctions between modern American dance and Afro-Caribbean dance here asserts these thoroughly creolized forms as irreducibly and simultaneously modern and Caribbean.

This essay also investigates the formal spatial relationship between the vertical and horizontal to argue that Prodigal Prince employs vodou’s queer embodied epistemology to insist upon the centrality of African diasporic movement to the category of modernist dance legible to a Western audience.[AW1]  In vodou thought, the spatial engagement with vertical and horizontal planes opens a fluid relationship between earthly and spiritual realms both in the two-dimensional form of the vévé (symbols drawn in sand or flour to evoke a particular lwa) and three-dimensionally in the form of choreographed movement in the temple. In Prodigal Prince, the highlighted interaction of vertical and horizontal body positions (complicated by the form of the circle) signals the queerness of Hyppolite’s spiritual devotion to the lwa, materialized in his paintings, alongside the narrative movement across planes of consciousness. Beyond the ballet’s summary narrative of Hyppolite’s 1943 vision is the polymorphous queerness of Hyppolite’s spiritual practice, where the vodouisant spiritually married multiple lwa of various genders. In the case of Erzulie and St. John the Baptist (or Ti Jean), frequent subjects of Hyppolite’s painting, this love triangle is queer as well as incestuous (Ti Jean is Erzulie’s son and occasional lover). The queer relation between painting and dance is conveyed conceptually rather than narratively because Holder’s ballet draws from the fluidity of vodou ritual practices that employ abstract representation and embodied movement to traverse earthly and spiritual realms.

The mise-en-scene of these respective formal components and the interwoven scope of these two dialogic contexts reveals the anti-colonial modernity of Prodigal Prince as “the epitome of black self-regard.” Black self-regard is also realized stylistically through the bold display of brown skin in Holder’s costuming. Male dancers appear in decorated dance belts, proclaiming their muscular mastery of dance as well as acknowledging the ballet’s own queerness and eroticism. Holder folds the vodou into a lexicon of modernism to challenge separation of African diasporic movement from Western dance, favoring the irresolution of anoriginary, and perhaps conflicting, syncretisms over fusion’s sublimation of a given part to the whole.