Ouvertures

The Living and The Dead Ensemble

The Living and the Dead Ensemble is a group of artists, performers and poets from Haiti, France and the United Kingdom. They first met in Haiti 2017, to produce the translation and performance in Haitian Creole of the play Monsieur Toussaint by Édouard Glissant. Based on an original idea by Louis Henderson and Olivier Marboeuf, the first film of the Ensemble OUVERTURES premiered at Berlinale 2020. This work explores the influence of Haiti, the first independent black republic of the Americas, in western modernity as the history and present of the Caribbean.

Mackenson Bijou was born in Grand-Goâve and currently lives in Croix des Bouquets in Haiti. He is a founding member of the cultural association “KALBAS AYITI” as well as The Living and The Dead Ensemble. He has worked in the cultural sector since 2011, organizing literary soirees with well-known authors. After theatrical training with Marilena Crosato in the context of a community theater project led by Oxfam Italia in 2013, he trained at the Théâtre National (in drama arts). He has performed in several plays, including Tonton America, Nuit d’espoir, Petite fleur du Ghetto and in the films by The Living and The Dead Ensemble (Ouvertures (Berlinale 2020) and The Wake) as well as in Bertrand Bonello’s film Zombi Child (Cannes 2019). He has just signed with Muskagroup for a new role in the film Malatchong. His poetic texts have been published in several anthologies.

Rossi Jacques Casimir is a poet, slam artist, actor and cultural actor based in Port-au-Prince in Haiti. He collaborated with the U.K. artist Jesse Darling for the installation Crash church in 2009 in the context of the Ghetto Biennale. In 2011, as part of a new edition of the Biennale, he began a collaboration with Roberto N. Peyer and Joyce Hip on the theme of “occupation”. In 2013 he met Shari Ruppert, who gave a new elan to his artistic trajectory. In parallel, writing of all kinds is omnipresent in his work. Since 2005 when he wrote Ayiti Dezespere (Haiti is desperate) in a state of urgency through to his participation with rap groups such as Mass Ghetto and B-Sektè. His writing has become more rooted since 2014, when his participation in collaborations and workshops began to increase (notably with the poet Saul Williams and the theater director Michèle Lemoine). In 2016 he created the artistic and social movement “Nou Pran Lari a”, which allowed the public to discover the creativity of local artists in the form of traveling exhibitions. He joined The Living and The Dead Ensemble in 2017 and played the role of Jean-Jacques Dessalines in the film Ouvertures.

Dieuvela Cherestal is an actress born in 1996 in Port-au-Prince (Haiti). She comes from a large family and was raised in a working class neighborhood in Carrefour-Feuilles where she still resides. After obtaining her baccalauréat diploma, Dieuvela began training in the hotel industry, but did not continue on with it. She decided to concentrate her energies on the activities she was most passionate about: sewing and theater. In 2017 she participated in an artistic project and began her career as an actress as a founding member of The Living and The Dead Ensemble. She has participated in the many activities of the Ensemble, including the film Ouvertures (Berlinale in 2020) and the project The Wake, interrupted by COVID 19 while the group was in residency at the Ateliers Medicis (outskirts of Paris), but which continues on in 2021.

James Desiris is a poet and actor. With an active practice of voodoo, he draws the source of his creativity from the heart of the Voodoo of Haiti, his birth country, which he blends into a hybrid form with other artistic forms; this gives a distinctive flavor to his work. He is currently a member of the AJAV Movement (Action of Young People for the Advancement of Voodoo) and the collective The Living and the Dead Ensemble.

James Peter Étienne lives in the Solino neighborhood of Port-au-Prince in Haiti. He operates on the artistic scene under multiple identities; sometimes as Mimétik Nèg, the smooth-talking slam poetry artist who is frequently seen at the slam nights of the Fokal Foundation, elsewhere as Zakh Turin, the actor who slips insides the skin of Mackandal in the film Ouvertures (Berlinale 2020), as well as incarnating the role of the sarcastic advocate of Fire in The Wake.

Louis Henderson is a filmmaker and writer who experiments with different ways of working with people to address and question our current global condition defined by racial capitalism and ever-present histories of the European colonial project. Since 2017, Henderson has been working within the artist group The Living and the Dead Ensemble. Based between Haiti and France, they focus on theatre, song, slam, poetry and cinema, their first feature film Ouvertures was awarded a FIPRESCI special mention at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival 2020. His work has been shown in various international film festivals, art museums and biennials and is distributed by LUX and Video Data Bank. He lives and works in Paris.

Léonard Jean-Baptiste (known as léO) is a multi-disciplinary artist who moves from poetry to sculpture, appears in theater and film, as well as being a musician. Born in 1997 in Haiti, where he began to develop his work, he currently lives in Belgium and is studying philosophy at the Free University of Brussels. He has participated in many lectures, plays, and performances. In 2018 he created the work Hybride, guided by the concept of Slap, which blends acting, poetry, song, and dance. In the spring of 2019, he made a video installation with the support of Nona prod, a young Belgian production company. He is a member of The Living and The Dead Ensemble, with whom he created Ouvertures and is currently participating in the group’s project The Wake. He is also pursuing his studies and writes when the wind of inspiration blows gently in through his windows.

Cynthia Maignan is currently studying Social Communications at the State University of Haiti. From a young age passionate about reading, theater, and cinema, she joined many social/cultural clubs. In 2012, after a workshop in Port-au-Prince, she founded the first entirely female slam collective in Haiti, DICOS, with her sister Sophonie Maignan. In 2013 she studied Dramatic Art at the Théâtre National of Haiti. In 2017 she joined The Living and The Dead Ensemble, playing Maman Dio and Susanne Toussaint in the play Monsieur Toussaint and in the film Ouvertures (Berlinale 2020). She participates actively in the Haitian cultural scene, leading reading and writing workshops for the young. And she continues on with the adventures of The Living and The Dead with the project The Wake.

Sophonie Maignan was born in 1993 and grew up in Port-au-Prince. At a young age she joined the NAC chorale with her sisters Lovely and Cynthia, where she took her first steps on stage, participating in concerts and performances organized in the chapel of the Villa Manrèse. She developed a great passion for literature and the theater. In 2012 she wrote and directed, with the collaboration of her sisters and a few friends from the NAC chorale, Les Dix Femmes Noires, a play inspired by the 19^th century Haitian poet Etzer Vilaire’s Dix Hommes Noirs. Feedback from professionals incited her to deepen her knowledge of stage direction. The next year she decided to enroll in the École Nationale des Arts in Port-au-Prince (ENARTS) to study theater. At the same time she developed a practice of slam with the DICOS collective, which she created with her sister Cynthia. She participated in slam workshops, such as the Collectif Hors Jeu, organized in 2012 at the IFH, as well as another in 2015 at the Fondasyon Konesans ak Libète (FOKAL), organized by the Rwandan actress Anisia Uzeymann and her husband, the American Slammer Saul Williams. That workshop saw the birth of Tonton America, a multi-disciplinary performance staged by Michèle Lemoine and presented at FOKAL in 2016. In 2015, in parallel with her artistic projects and her studies at ENARTS, she was accepted into the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) to study Modern Literature. When the school closed in 2017, she continued her studies in Lorient (France), obtaining a Masters 2 in research on Caribbean literature and in particular on the work of the contemporary Haitian author Gary Victor. In Brittany she participates in the local slam scene in parallel with the projects of The Living and The Dead Ensemble.

Olivier Marboeuf is an author, graphic artist, performer, and independent exhibition curator of Caribbean origin. After studies in the sciences, he gravitated in a self-taught manner toward artistic practices, creating in 1992 the experimental graphic novel publishing house AMOK (which later became Frémok: http://www. fremok.org) in partnership with the author Yvan Alagné, then founding the art centre Espace Khiasma in Les Lilas (a suburb on the north-east outskirts of Paris) (http://www.khiasma.net), which he directed from 2004 to 2018. He taught visual arts and the theory of image from 2002 to 2008 at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art de Nancy (France). At Khiasma, he developed a program centered around questions of minority representations, associating exhibitions, film projections, debates, performances, and collaborative projects in the region to the north-east of Paris. In his curatorial work as in his texts, he revivifies the figure of the storyteller by imagining it as a position from which it is possible to assemble stories and to question the manners of saying and the structures of power in the artistic and cultural fields of the neoliberal world. His work associates critical productions, speculative fiction, performances and social and collective experiments which consider the body as a singular archive. He also produces films and moving images with the production company Spectre Productions, which he created in 2013 (www.spectre-productions.com).