Carnival celebrations in the Caribbean have in recent decades become objects of advertising interests, dependent on fulfilling the elements that make up a spectacle with stricter administration and increasing conservative supervision. Despite this trend, traditions like Rara in Haiti keep its vigour alive in the body of its participants, despite a lack of institutional support, outside visibility, schematic announcements, and efforts to alter it by local powers. Happening during Lent, Rara brings together several hundred pedestrians in ritualistic processions throughout the city and the countryside to guard freedom and to reconnect with the invisible forces occupying the space. These processions represent a unifying, intergenerational popular resistance that is joyful, serious, and transcendental.

In this talk curator Giscard Bouchotte and choreographer Kettly Noël expand together on Rara, commenting on its use and relations to the public space and shared realms and the collective body that puts forth practice and performance, interlinking the relational and the spiritual. Rara speaks of today, even if the sequels of the past are still present, symptoms of a post-colonial society dedicated to precariousness, violence, discrimination, and foiled but always recurring racism and gender hierarchy. For its participants, this community experience provides pinnacle moments of solidarity and surging force that reinforces the notion that liberation belongs to the people.