Rite de passage — solo II

Choreographed by Bintou Dembélé for her long-time collaborator Michel “Meech” Onomo, Rite de passage — solo II unfolded in what felt like a series of distinct sections or movements. The first was frenetic. Onomo flung his body through rangy dance vocabularies, moving with urgency, suddenly stopping, then picking up again. Each gestural sequence seemed to begin with a flurry of hands — shaking, flicking, and vibrating — that pulled the rest of the body into energetic articulation, producing arm swings that recall West African forms such as Kpanlogo or chains of the tensile contractions that characterize krumping.

This emphasis on the hand as an agential source of movement calls up a particular term. From the Latin words for “hand” and “to let go,” manumission refers to the enfranchisement of an enslaved person, a process codified in historical legal systems ranging from ancient Greece, to the French Code Noir, to American state laws. Such a transition from captivity to freedom is one of the passages that Dembélé’s title suggests. As its program notes detail, Rite de passage asks what a maroon dance might look like — a query that references communities established throughout the Americas by formerly enslaved individuals, beginning in the sixteenth century, who found freedom through escape or manumission. The choreographic logic of the piece launches the dancer into motion from his hands. Momentum travels down from the wrist, discharging the body into the open, yet viscerally effortful, terrain of expressive movement — an allegory for a kind of self-directed manumission, which collects freeing and being freed into a single figure of dancerly force.