Miami Beach Rara

Sunday, May 19, 2019, at Lummus Park from 5th St. – 14th   St. and Ocean Drive, Miami Beach, FL takes its form from the Haitian carnival tradition.  All activities are free.  MBR includes 50 participants or more in a large moving procession with a live  Haitian RaRa band, around a route dancing, singing, twirling flags.  MBR is multi-generational, appropriate for all ages, and is designed to embrace everyone, serving as a meeting place for audience and visitors to interact with Miami’s pan-Caribbean heritage and communities.  

Rara is a ritual and parts of it takes the form of a street procession that mostly takes place during the week of Lent or Easter, Gede or Day of the Dead and Christmas in Haiti and its diaspora with hierarchy, pledges and alliances. It incorporates elements of ritual, folklore, fertility rites, music, dance, colorful costumes, and examines the porous nature of identity interrogating  the roles of gender, class, and authority

In the Dominican Republic it is know as Gaga traveling from Haiti starting circa 1844 via the migration of sugar cane plantation workers.

Gaga soon became a Dominican phenomenon, finding expression in a bewildering variety of different places such the slums of the cities amongst the old sugar cane workers barracks, the sugarcane fields and  in other cities in the  sugarcane growing regions  of Dominican Republic . Today practiced by the Arrayanos or Dominicans of Haitian Decent. 

Rara was a product of a Haiti’s revolutionary social and political era as well as a response to the need to believe in something that would help the most exploited people during a very difficult parts of their lives.

It celebrates the coming of spring and fertility.  It gives thanks to the gods for a good sugarcane harvest.  It negotiates relationships amongst communities.

The rara staff forms a sort of government.  It has a president, notaries, ministers or deputies, clerks and police, along with remnants of a hierarchy in which the queens occupy an important position. The formation of the Gaga ranks are military and official and  based on an imagine military government.

The participants of the rara have made a pledge to their Saint or deity to march for 7 years with that rara binding the person to the rara as a server.

The Rara ceremonies take place in a Hounfour -  enramada or a temple which usually will have a center pole or an axis mundi a highway between heaven and earth where the saints are evoked.  The veves are magic writing or symbols that represent the names of the gods and are drawn with white powder around the center pole of the shrine. Elegua who is like St. Peter the key holder is ask to open the roads between the heaven and the earth and allowed the saints to join us in this celebration.  

In Miami we are very fortunate to have two rara groups - Kriz Rara that comes out on Saturday and Rara Lakay which meets on Friday.  .  The instruments in rara are particular, with special drums and horns and the bamboos.  

You can join and dance in the streets with Kriz Rara most Saturday in little Haiti.  

I have lived different periods in countries where the presence of people of African descent is practically nonexistent and these migratory processes have been important in my life and work as they have allowed me to reflect on questions such as transnational identity, borders, cultural differences, but above all to educate.

My interest is not highlighting all the violence that has befallen the colonized people, but promoting joy, the emancipated body, the party. My artistic practice focuses on "radical hope"; which requires flexibility, openness and what Lear describes as "imaginative excellence". And the belief as Junot Diaz states that "it will help us create a better and more affective future" which I believe is at the core of Dominican and other Caribbean nation’s idiosyncrasy and culture  and that which has helped us to survive all the blows we have received as a people since the beginning of the colonies delivered by the colonizers, dictators and by nature itself with its frequent hurricanes and its devastating tremors.

Among my performances, I attach great importance to the aesthetic and spiritual dynamics of the Gaga festival, where we all together build a spiritual festival where we dance to the depths of our spirits and where human life is transformed into a constant and sovereign living space. The gaga is an elaborate aesthetic pursuit linked to the postcolonial approach of the performing arts such as theater, music and dance, and merging with these individual biographical aspects, life, biographies and subjectivities taken by the rupture of memories that means the displacement, migration and the critique of hegemonic identities.

Gaga, pubic spirituality for better days.

Gaga corporality plays a central role. There is no petition, prayer or mantra without a body of execution, available to celebrate the spirituality of the living, the sanctity of the living. The altar can be trees, seas, mountains, too. The more bodies they have, the greater the power of peace. The greater its contribution to the community based on an idea of ​​cultural communion.

I look for in the performance these forces these, encounters between the community, that they have strived to maintain a decent life expectancy. Women and men who follow their best convictions to make this place a place of inclusion, tolerance and respect for what is different. These bodies are essentially diasporic, coming from various territorial and conceptual geographies that are the instruments of connection between today and the past and a new future. These bodies, yesterday discriminated and socially accused, today appear with dignity and strength of their differences to make this a better world. They know the struggles and the efforts, they bring their physical and symbolic memory fighting modern forms of slavery like racism, sexism and gender violence. It has been a peaceful fight, carnival tactics, his convictions, the right to happiness.

The radical hope is the carnibalization of sadness which has encouraged many exploits of oppressed cultures. Behind the great carnivals you can find very valuable information. In singing or dancing there are reasons and convictions, reasons for freedom.

The important, perishable flows, sounds, and movements stagnate and disappear. What flows visible, like a restless torrent of water, pushes whatever is in its path, burgeons what is around. In my project, the art of performance is that river that moves this living water.

My research project addresses the creation and imagination of Gaga through an interdisciplinary approach. I study it from the conception of movement and flow, understanding it as the field of cultural mutation that is located in the places where it is organized. It could be said that this expression is capable of taking cultural elements and merge them indiscriminately in places where it is. Thus, in Haiti or in the Dominican Republic, it acquires particular characteristics. Syncretism, coloring, gestures and sounds form a particular dance.

Gaga is an area of ​​information transfer, image transfer and citation of dissimilar territories. It is key to understand the history and the imaginations of the Arrayanos. Both are built of cultural remnants, pieces of living intermediaries of visual culture. All these cultures have strength in the idea of ​​a living and vital nature, vibrant and transforming.

The human being in these ceremonies is conceived as part of nature itself. The human being is thought as an extension of the creative chaos that originated life. Its power also expands with the expansion of natural forces. It dances and moves so that the water moves and flows. So that the winds oxygenate the earth or purify the energies that give movement to life.

Dancing for the fire that makes life live in the world would be the responsibility of all gaga dancers. To move energy to the life of the call.

Throughout this call, the fundamental tool for generating life is the body. The body is an antenna for gaga. In this antenna are the energies of the deep earth and floating on the air and the wind. Here, in this encounter, the body is a channel, without this energetic conjunction would not be possible. It is a unique and unrepeatable body and without that individuality there is no intensive encounter.

As such, each channel is special, fundamental and indispensable. No body is surplus, nor is anyone incapacitated to generate the connection. The more antenna bodies transmit from pole to pole, the more effective and powerful the discharge. This is the reason why gaga requires dancers, requires body movements and celebration that move the best wind energy, water or fire, the highest energies of the living.

In its unique and unrepeatable character, the ecstatic body loses boundaries that nest and segments. In the body in gaga ,the ecstasy is everything and nothing, light and shadow, life and death. Life as reinforcement of fertility in nature, death as a possible replacement. Nothing is lost, one could say that everything is transformed, when we think about the rituals of the Antilles, understanding that the supreme function of the human on the face of the earth, would be to survive in balance with other living entities that are with us, coexisting. We are not bigger than a tree, nor more than a stream of crystal clear water. We both cohabitate and are a differentiated and multiple version of a divine creation. The gaga celebrates water and wind and calls for unique bodies, twinned in the condition of channel in relation to gods and goddesses that give us bread and peace.