Jimmy Hu | Student Life

Léna Blou, choreographer, dancer, and educator, paid a visit to Washington University to give a class on the Guadeloupean Gwo-ka dance and a lecture titled “Performing the Political,” leaving encouraging remarks for students who love dancing to continue their artistic pursuit, April 19.

Blou, recipient of the French Legion of Honor, holds a Ph.D. in the anthropology of dance. She collaborated with many of the greatest dancers worldwide and undertook a didactic analysis of Gwo-ka dances and the emergence of the concept “Bigidi” and the technique “Techni’ka.” Her visit was sponsored by the University’s French Connexions and the Performing Arts Department.

During the class in the morning, around thirty dancers of different levels were shown the background of the Gwo-ka dance and its techniques.

“We reserved some time for discussing the culture, the history, and a bit of the context about what Gwo-ka is,” Blou said. “I immersed them in the technique of Gwo-ka, or what I call the ‘Techni’ ka,’ and at the same time, I let them experience the philosophy of Bigidi, which is one of resistance and of the ability to adapt.”

“Techni’ka is very complex because it demands skills in conversation with timing, music, space and the body,” according to Blou said. “One must also learn to improvise because it’s a dance of improvisation.”

Music is also an indispensable part of the Gwo-ka dance traditions. 

“In Gwo-ka, there are musicians, and there are dancers, and there is a relationship between the two,” Blou said. As tambours used as accompaniment for the dance were not available, Blou asked the students to create music “with their bodies and their mouths.”

Reflecting upon the class, Blou expressed her contentment with its success and how much interest the dancers have shown in the Gwo-ka dance.

“The frustration for me was that I did not leave enough time to let them explore and invent a dance by themselves from this technique,” Blou said. “Deep down, they are passionate about dance — the avidity and the thirst for learning of the students in the classroom were felt and seen.”

“These dancers were mentally prepared to take on the difficulty, to sweat, and to learn new things,” Blou said. “The practice questions and challenges the dancers, and sometimes destabilizes them, yet I think [the destabilization] is necessary for learning.”

The concept of “destabilization,” relevant to “Bigidi,” is central to Blou’s research on the Caribbean dance traditions, presented in the English-French bilingual lecture she gave in the afternoon.

French Professor Lionel Cuillé introduced her to the audience, made up of students who are interested in dance and the French language. Blou started the lecture with a video detailing the philosophy and the style of the Gwo-ka dance stemming from the particular historical situation of Guadeloupe.

“I dodge. I anticipate. I adapt myself to the mutations of an archipelago in the making, where nothing has yet to have a definite place,” her voice in the video narrated. “For us Guadeloupeans, [Bigidi] is encoded in the dance.”

Following the video, Blou discussed the inspirational foundation of her coinage of the “Bigidi” concept.

According to Blou, “Bigidi” is defined as a reference to “disequilibrium, swerving, feinting, the unpredictability of gesture, physical instability, and an inconsistent and unexpected body state.”

She reminisced about how her mother has always advised her to be cautious in the streets, using the expression “Bigidi, mais pas tombé,” a rhyming phrase in Guadeloupean Creole French roughly translating to “Bigidi, but not yet fallen.”

“Many times my dancers have almost fallen while dancing, but they have never touched the floor,” Blou said. “The body of a Guadeloupean dancer is strongly predisposed to imbalance.”

As a consequence of the slave trade, the constant threats of natural disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes, and the racialized socioeconomic relations, Caribbean dance traditions in general feature references to “chaos, rupture, and adaptation.”

“The strategy of Bigidi was invented by my ancestors from Africa — it is a form of life force against slavery in the Americas, which has been a total chaos for African and Amerindian people,” Blou said. “Bigidi is the stability born out of chaos.”

“Each person of the Caribbeans knows a Bigidi,” Blou added. “We Caribbean people have the experiences and the resolution inside ourselves to affront the difficulties of life, with our ‘dance of life.’”

“My ancestors used the dance as knowledge — it is the vision of my people towards the world,” Blou said. Years of research have brought her the firm conviction that the Gwo-ka dance can “influence the aesthetic of other dances, globally.”

“Our life is a dance,” Blou concluded. “It traverses time, so that the movement upholds the wrinkle of history, so that the body’s memories do not fade away.”

After the lecture, Bihotza James-Lejarcegui, a senior majoring in Global Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, minoring in French, and head choreographer of the University’s salsa dance team, WU Sauce, said that Blou’s visit was “inspiring” for her and that Blou’s discourse connects to her past research on traditional dances in Cameroon and Senegal.

“When I was learning about West African traditional dances and how they have prevailed through colonization, [I realized that] the root of it is story-telling,” James-Lejarcegui commented, emphasizing the “emotional and ancestral ties” she was able to see in Blou’s pedagogical approach.

“It’s a way of expressing oneself, of identifying with each other and with one’s culture — and that’s something often lost in the dance forms that we see in Western societies today,” James-Lejarcegui added.

Upon her return to Chicago, Blou left a few words of encouragement for the University’s dancers, telling them to embrace dance no matter how much their academic and professional life requires of them.

“In our current educational system, an individual can lose one’s consciousness, the totality of one’s being, because of the pressure, and sometimes there are consequences, ones that fragilizes, leading to suicides, depressions, abandonments,” Blou commented. “Dancing, as a result, not only allows us to find pleasure, to reconnect with our body, but it also allows us to discover that we are resourceful, capable, and when we produce, create something with our body; it means that we are capable enough to bring forth a variety of beautiful things to the fullest extent.

Social trends categorize people by assigning us roles to play that never resemble our true identities, according to Blou. “Dance, in turn, allows us to understand and recognize who we truly are, profoundly — it is a miraculous weapon that affronts the difficulties of life,” Blou said.

“I advise my students that, even if it’s only for five seconds, even if it’s dancing alone in their room, they should really put on that music and dance,” Blou said.

In addition, she also emphasized the necessity to study the arts in general.

“To study the arts is to understand humanity — art is the only medium that brings humans closer to each other,” Blou said. “It is a way to protect and support ourselves, no matter whether it is to put the music on, to read a poem, or to look at the painting of nature.”

“There is a spiritual side to arts, perhaps — it is to bring back the very simple things, which are the strength of life. Each one of our serene evenings, waking up in the morning, taking a stroll, and even breathing — we forgot how it is already a grace,” Blou concluded.