The choreographer’s site-specific open-air performance recounts a Caribbean struggle to persevere amid threat. ((Credit: Diana Fonte)
Guadeloupean choreographer Léo Lérus created Traces of Gounouj as a love letter to the lush Caribbean terrain that inspired it, but it came to life on New York’s own Governors Island on an early October Saturday, as part of L’Alliance Française’s Crossing the Line festival. Free to anyone who passed by the park square or who intentionally came for the performance, the 20-minute experimental sound-and-dance piece celebrated the resilience of the island’s people as they strive to sustain their culture amid abiding French colonialism, and as they seek to protect the land’s natural beauty in the face of looming climate change.
Under an azure autumn sky, the abstract performance combined the movement of two dancers – sometimes together, sometimes separate – with a recorded score of nature sounds, guitar, percussion, and chanting in Creole, sometimes spoken, sometimes sung.
Dancers Asha Thomas and Robert Cornejo emerged organically from behind the trees surrounding the lawn that became their stage. Cornejo picked up several fluorescent light tubes, one by one, and set each down in front of the audience, demarcating the playing space. The beat of a deep boula drum slowly, assertively crescendoed over a loudspeaker, accompanied by the chirpy croaks of recorded frogs. (“Gounouj” means “frog” in Creole.)
Traces of Gounouj blossomed from Lèrus’s 2022 work, Gounouj In Situ, a site-specific trio performance that he created while immersed in the protected natural site of Grande Anse/Gros Morne in Guadeloupe. Lerus expanded it into Gounouj in 2024, a four-dancer adaptation for an international tour.
Now, in Lérus’s third iteration, Traces of Gounouj is a duet designed for urban open-air spaces, in which dancers relate to each other and to the earth they cavort upon They sometimes crouch low and jump, a nod to the eponymous Martinique robber frog, a species native to the island and at risk of extinction due to deforestation and pollution. The frog is known more for its song than its appearance; a loud clicking noise was audible throughout the show’s soundtrack.
The piece offers an homage to Gwoka, the music, song, and dance tradition of Guadeloupean culture. (“Gwo ka” translates to “big drum” in Creole.)
Gwoka originally served as a means of communication among enslaved people, each of its seven rhythms relating to a different story and emotion. When France’s King Louis XIV outlawed the use of drums with his 1685 “code noir” laws for French colonies, the people recreated polyrhythmic music with their breath, in a technique called Bouladjèl. Traces of Gounouj opened with the hum of a Boudjadèl track hovering over the outdoor space, unaccompanied by instruments. The boula and ka drums, used in incantation and other Caribbean traditions like Haitian vodou rituals, also featured prominently in the soundtrack.
The improvisational nature of Gwoka techniques echoed in the spontaneity of the dancers’ movements. The duo engaged in a push-pull dance, a call-and-response where one awaited the other, as if to affirm or reject their intentionally asymmetrical, broken gestures. Lightly clad in green and blue linen blouses and sandals, the dancers merged with the greenery.
Thomas followed Cornejo’s lead – but not always exactly, more a refraction than a reflection of his movements, like the scattered light that filtered through the trees. They lurched back and forward, creating instability as if they cautiously peered over a ledge on flat ground. This posture evoked bigidi, an embodied philosophy that means “to stumble,” coined by choreographer and Lerus’s former teacher, Lēna Blou. The full phrase, “bigidi, mais pas tombé” signifies disequilibrium but never falling, a tribute to the resilience of the people of Guadeloupe.
Midway through the piece, the soft lullaby of guitar plucking bridged traditional Gwoka with modern Gwoka Jazz of the 1970s and 1980s, when musicians began to layer in contemporary chords. The style is hopeful yet melancholy, evoking a bittersweet nostalgia and appreciation for what is to come.
The dancers swayed. She pointed in the distance; he turned to look. She led now. As he had done earlier, she now bolted upright in alarm, as if spotting peril. The syncopated Bouladjel sounded like sirens.
Although the chanted lyrics were incomprehensible to the Anglophone ear, the tone was universal: a warning a family member extends out of loving worry. Cornejo leapt high into the air; Thomas did not follow.
The dancers touched each other only at the end of the piece. His hands enclosed hers, and they moved together. The threat of danger seemed to have passed. The piece concluded with a fortified sense of hope for the survival of the Guadeloupean tradition. Croaking persisted.
About the author(s)
Diana Fonte is a Master's student at Columbia Journalism School specializing in Arts and Culture Journalism.