It was standing room only at Gerald W. Lynch Theater for the long-awaited return of L’Acadco – A United Caribbean Dance Force to New York City after 20 years.
This evening was aptly described as a “seven-course meal of music and dance” where L’Acadco, a Jamaica-based contemporary dance company, took the audience on a journey of ancestral memories and the evolution of Caribbean culture with movement.
Under the theme: Building Bridges Through The Arts, L’Acadco dancers and drummers told moving stories of the African Diaspora. The company’s Founder and Artistic Director is Dr. L’Antoinette Stines, a trailblazing Jamaican dancer, choreographer, author, and actor.
Dr. Stines’ respected work has spanned several decades. In 1978, she founded L’Acadco, Miami’s first Black dance company. After returning to Jamaica in the 1980s, she continued to grow the dance company, which has become a dynamic symbol of cultural preservation and development.
Stines then created the renowned dance technique known as L’Antech, a first-of-its-kind contemporary training procedure in the English-speaking Caribbean.
“What I have done is brought together what came off the ships when they did and sometimes we forget that it is not just Africa that came off the ship, India came off the ship, China came off the ship. So my technique is a synabridge,” Stines tells ESSENCE.
“You see Indian movement, you see Chinese movement. But it is happening on the body simultaneously– while Africa is happening and Europe is happening, what I have done is connect them,” she says.
The renowned dancer and choreographer went even deeper. She explained that the L’Antech technique means a dancer is being technically trained to facilitate the norms in dance, such as the arabesque and the plié movements, while at the same time giving respect to ancestral memories.
“We can do the language of classical ballet blended with the language of Africa,” she shares. “So while you’re doing the classical work, you’re also doing the bubbles in the hips, so that we speak Patois, or another Caribbean Islander might speak Creole. So dancing in those languages, we connect to our people.”
Dr. Stines says it took her about 20 years to develop the technique fully. Her years of hard work are now reflected in the fact that L’Antech is taught in schools and is included in the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate known as CSEC and the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination known as CAPE.
“To know that it’s now textbooks and that it is codified as examinable, that it’s on exams… it went in the field,” she said. “It is the only technique out of the anglophone Caribbean, so I am really proud.”
Dancers from across the Caribbean, the United States, India, the Congo, Australia, and Canada have come to Jamaica to take classes featuring L’Antech. Some have even worked to become certified in the technique, which Stines says can take years, just as ballet and other well-known dance techniques.
When asked what she hopes that people take away from experiencing L’Antech and the performances of L’Acadco, Dr. Stines said :”I hope that people see it and that it exemplifies connection and storytelling through dance, and we are connecting the diaspora, one movement at a time.”
