„Cette danse est dédiée à la beauté révolutionnaire du peuple Haïtien, du passé, du futur et du présent.“ Ana Pi

For her new creation, The Divine Cypher, choreographer and dance researcher Ana Pi undertook a poetic-political research in Haiti: at the center of her interest are ritual gestures of the ancestors and their „perpetuation“ in today’s imaginary.

Meeting and learning from contemporary artists was as important to Ana Pi as the imaginary dialogue with choreographer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham and her collaborator and later avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren. The latter had toured Haiti in the 1940s and 1950s, ten years after Katherine Dunham – following in her footsteps, in a sense – and equipped with her understanding of dance, capturing Haitian culture, dance and voodoo heritage on film.

Ana Pi draws on gestures captured on film, weaving archive and artistic design, images of the past and the future into a structure of fragile balance. Recipient of a scholarship awarded by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Cisneros Institute for this creation, The Divine Cypher circulates between image and dance, between journey and fiction, following one interest: How do sacred dances survive to this day? What resonance do they have? What role do video games play in the transmission of these practices? How can this code of fantastic gestures be expanded for the future?

Ana Pi was last seen as a performer alongside Dessa Ganda, Tanisha Vicky Germain and TRVΛNIΛ in Beunruhigung 1, the opening performance of the International Performance Festival Permanente Beunruhigung in the fall of 2018 at Ballhaus Naunynstraße. The Divine Cypher premiered in Paris in November 2021 and is now presented in Germany for the first time.