“Breathe” is a colorful, highly kinetic performance, an immersive celebration of art, technology, spiritual traditions and nature. Taking the concept of the Sacred Clown from the Pre-Columbian American Indigenous tribal traditions, the performance seeks to unite experimental music and dance with concepts of traditional Afro-Caribbean root performance and indigenous Taino music and dance. The Holy Warrior heals the Spirit, the Shaman heals the Body, the Sacred Clown heals the Soul. Most of the American tribes had their Clowns. In the Vodum tradition the Trickster is Elegua. In the culture of the Lakota people, the heyoka is a contrarian, jester, and satirist, who speaks, moves and reacts in an opposite fashion to the people around them.

Life eats entropy. Therefore, “Breathe” seeks to create a flow of energy between the audience and the dancers’ chaotic structures, performances and sounds, which force the viewer to interact with the piece. Rara (Gaga as it is known in Dominican Republic) 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. 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. The rara/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. Rara asks you to take part in the dance.

The same way Paleolithic shamans-dancers identified themselves metaphysically with the untamed creatures that were their sustenance – today one needs to summon the energies for spiritual sustenance. One must honor the energies as sustenance and as a field of knowledge. In some traditions, the clown was regarded as an “apotropaic” ritual (exorcism) a way to divert demonic attention from some important religious activities. Like the Shaman who presumably enters chaos for the greater good, “Breathe” aims at creating performances that are cathartic to heal the soul and expel the bad during this difficult time we are living.