FIELDWORK

below footage reflects fieldwork research in Senegal + Benin from 2019 - 2024

Journey… finds its visual inspiration in the surrealistic character of a vodoun aesthetic and that of the pictorial language of Béninese bas-relief artist, Cyprien Toukoudagba, where things are not always what they seem and meaning can lie just beneath the surface (or under a mask). The dance cultures of Benin and Senegal provide an embodied point of departure and reflect the main influences of yaTande’s African diasporic aesthetic sensibilities.

Vodun, and largely indigenous African spiritual culture, remains shrouded in mystery, maligned, and simply misunderstood. It is through my life as a vodouist/African spiritualist, and priest, that I have found global belonging connecting to various cultures of the world. I share this experience with the public through my artistry in an effort to unburden that which remains oppressed by the mainstream and concealed by practitioners.

“Journey of a Thousand Dreams” will rely on embodied, creative, auto-ethnographic research methods that can yield a range of outcomes illuminating African and African diasporic dance as a stabilizing cultural force of communal and familial knowledge. I am intrigued by the presence and meanings of embodied ancestral inheritances as a cultural mainstay and a life-affirming and sustaining phenomena in the lives of individuals and communities at-large.