A renowned dancer and choreographer with a doctorate in ethnochoreology, Lēnablou is completing her Villa Albertine residency at Rice University in March 2023. Contributing to a network for arts and ideas spanning France and the United States, Lēnablou is working with Jacqueline Couti, Professor Laurence H. Favrot in French studies, and Chair of Modern and Classical Literatures and Cultures. Throughout her residency, Lēnablou will engage with Rice students and faculty as well as artists from the greater Houston community around what she terms bigidi, how the body of the Caribbean dancer, in a state of permanent imbalance, adapts to chaos.
Lēnablou is invited to Rice University and Houston because her dance and scholarly expertise around the ways in which the body adapts to chaos and disasters can enrich meaningful discussions about the history and legacy of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. These discussions have become more critical at Rice and Houston in recent years. In 2019, Rice launched a task force to address its segregationist history. Rice now houses the world’s largest database on the history of the slave trade—namely about the transatlantic and intra-American slave trades. In 2021, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) launched the US tour of Afro-Atlantic Histories, which presents the work of artists from 24 countries. Having Lēnablou as an artist in residence in Houston will provide the opportunity to offer workshops and roundtables (one or two a week) that will be essential for advancing scholarly research at Rice.
As a scholar and an artist, Lēnablou considers the dancing body a thinking body. She wonders how dance can be a privileged technology to respond to the deconstruction of the invisible traumas of history. How can the dancing body react to a (re)construction of the self? She wants participants to question, explore, and tease out the concepts of unpredictability, disorder, chaos, disasters, imbalance, and adaptation in the Americas—which includes the Gulf-coast. Lēnablou’s research is also about spatiality, about how the body interacts in the world. She will bring back the French Caribbean to the Gulf Coast, and her discussions on the black dancing body, on the black body in an unstable state, remind us that the notions of frontiers are more fluid than we usually think. Due to the interdisciplinary characteristic of her expertise, her residency will bring much to Rice University and Houston and show the richness and variety of French culture
