« Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?

Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,

in that grey vault. The sea. The sea

has locked them up. The sea is History. »

Derek Walcott, The Sea is History, 1979.

The Sea is History is a continuation of choreographer Betty Tchomanga’s work on the circulation of Afro-diasporic memories, narratives, and stories. Through the bodies and voices of ten dancers, Tchomanga explores the phantom limbs of the African diaspora. How does the absence of certain narratives, images, voices inhabit bodies to the point of setting them in motion?

As African-American writer Toni Morrison emphasizes, no story, no song has come down to us from the space of the slave ships. There are account books, drawings showing how slaves were organized in the hold of the ship, shipowners’ reports, a few accounts of mutinies, but no first-hand accounts by survivors of the experience of this fundamental space for Afro-diasporic/Afro-Caribbean identity.

In The Sea is History, dance emerges from the repetition of a ternary rhythm that sets in motion a dance step commonly known as a triplet. It is a simple step, a march, a gesture of crossing.
The repetition of this very physical motif, the insistence of this hammering, brings forth elusive and fleeting images that precede and transcend us.

The endless repetition born by the group produces a common momentum, soon populated by deities, figures of resistance, and non-human presences. They circulate between the different lands to which the performers are connected, an entire Afro-diasporic cosmogony.

In this way, The Sea is History conjures up oceanic imaginaries that are at once tragic, sublime, and luminous.