The Words We Move By

Kay is house in Haitian Kreyol. Lakay is home. I changed the spelling to match the umlaut in Haïti, a wink to my roots.

Which makes Fèt Lakaï a house party in the most literal sense of the words.

Realness. Straight from the source. Loud and unapologetic, with nothing watered down to make it easier to take.

In our work it means we do not dilute our culture to make it more palatable for our guests and audiences.

Due to the horrors of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Africans primarily from West Africa were kidnapped, sold and scattered across the world. There exists a commonality between us that spreads to various countries in the western hemisphere through music and dance.

Every style we use has its own story and history, and we choose each one with intention.

One voice CALLS, the group RESPONDS. It is a West and Sub-Saharan African tradition and ritual that survived the crossing. It never left Black music, church, or community, and it is one of the things that ties us together.

At Fèt Lakaï it is how we perform among the people instead of in front of them.

A genre and culture born in the Bronx in the early 1970s. The dance is one of the elements, alongside DJing, MCing and writing. It came up in the party and the cypher, and it has never stopped being a conversation between the dancer, the DJ and the crowd.

The culture was born out of a need when the people of the South Bronx were facing racist policies from the city of New York that led to poor living conditions resembling war zones. It was literally born out of the ashes of the neighborhood it came from, a Phoenix out of ashes.

Hip-Hop exists as a melting pot and translation of a conversation that has been happening since the times of our ancestors in West and Sub-Saharan Africa. We as a people were able to recall parts of the dance and music that united us before. The culture is made up of many parts within the diaspora ranging from the Caribbean to Mexico.

Born out of a need for a place of belonging, house came from a club called The Warehouse in Chicago in the early 1980s. It was a haven for the Black queer community in Chicago. When many were not allowed in churches with their families, they created their own space of soulful release in the club, with a genre derived from disco.

The original dance pioneers were queer Black dancers who found a space to let loose. Eventually a lot of those moves became codified into what we know today as jacking, loose legs, and more.

Haitian folkloric dance is the result of the moves and rhythms that were preserved when the different nations and tribes came together on the island of Haiti. Each rhythm belongs to a nanchon, a nation that respects and represents what that group of people brought with them. Rada, Petwo, Kongo, Ibo, Nago, Djouba, Banda.

The dance is also a spiritual base for the Haitian religion of Vodou, a religion that venerates nature, spirits (Lwas) and calling the ancestors. One of the dances is Yanvalou, which was a dance to call upon the water and the wheel of life. It involves the spine moving like water, in turn creating circles with your hips that represent the wheel of life. While enslaved, the people of Haiti could not go to the waters for healing, so they brought the waters of healing to themselves through the movement.

A blanket term that encapsulates Guinea, Mali, Senegal, Ghana and more, each with its own drums, its own rhythms, its own reason for dancing.

Most of the West African dances we do as a company come from Guinea, whether it is Kasa, Dundunba, Sinte or Mendiani. We use instruments such as the Djembe, Dunduns and the Talking Drum. While not typically included when referring to traditional West African dances, we also dance Afrobeats, with many of those moves coming from Ghana and Nigeria.

The artistic storytellers and keepers of the culture among many different West African nations. The Griot carries the history of a people through dance and music, and passes it to whoever comes next.

Our youth will be our modern day Griots.

Black American music and the dance that came up with it, birthed out of New Orleans from the rhythms of the surrounding Afro-Diaspora. Jazz is the precursor to every modern American genre and dance. Jazz is what happens when we take the rhythms that we brought with us and mix them with the instruments we had available in America, the horns and piano.

Vernacular jazz dance lives in the social floor and the swing rhythm, which is a different thing from the studio jazz that took the name later. You can see elements of jazz dance in all of the street dances today.

The cypher is THE circle. Whether you are a rapper or a dancer, it is sacred, and it is where we share our experiences, our feelings and anything we have been working on through freestyle. One at a time, while everybody else holds the ring and keeps the energy up.

This is a practice and tradition older than hip-hop and jazz. It had many names in the past and many names throughout the Afro-Diaspora. It is one of the sacred traditions that we brought with us, one that helped us survive the conditions of slavery as well as the conditions of systematic racism here in this country and others.

"The circle of the dance is a permissive circle: it protects and permits."

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

We keep that circle open.