Unrevealed Revelations: 

Philbert Kalinda Technique for Dance and Performance 

https://www.jamiephilbert.com/work/kalinda-as-a-technology-for-dance-and-performance

By Jamie J. Philbert 

How does one precisely communicate an entity of ancient futurism through African-diaspora technology? How do you define that which defies definition and exceeds application? How do you map the mobility of its thoughts and tongues throughout existence by way of a singular Western textual expression? While these questions embark on the conflict proposed in this communication, it simultaneously gives way to the introduction to one of the many definitions of Kalinda, an ancient African-Caribbean futurist technology which generates a multiplicity of responses to conflict. If a technology is to unsettle the confines of conflict through multiple responses, it must be in itself multiplicitous and this is the direct nature of Kalinda. Kalinda is multi-dimensional ritualised warfare, a collection of dances, a collection of songs, a ring sport/game, a sacred martial tradition and a way of life situated in Trinidad and Tobago. Kalinda is an archive, it is architecture. 

I begin by pouring these words in libation and give thanks and praise to the Most High Creator, my mother and father, Veronica and Dennis Philbert, my healed and honourable ancestors, and the ceaseless spirit and ancestors of Kalinda. This initiation of praises serves as a testimony to the way of life to which I am present to and exist in, a kalinda existence. In January 2019, I began my initiation into Kalinda and completed entry immersion in February 2021. I define initiation as a state of becoming. In his work, African Cosmology of the Bantu Kongo: Principles of Life and Living, Dr. Fu-Kiau states  that “man is the second sun rising and setting around the earth”(Fu Kiau 2001, p. 25) and that this rising is imperative “to Kala, to be, becoming and to light fire”(Fu Kiau 2001, p. 26). As quoted by Michael Meade, “initiatory events are those that define who a person is, or cause some power to erupt from them, or strip everything from them until all that is left is their essential self” (Somé 1998, p. 275). 

I coin this essential self in my Kalinda practice and the Philbert-Kalinda Technique for dance and performance (PKT) as the ‘multiverse of self’. The exploration and accessing of this ‘multiverse of self ' is conducted through a cycle of 4 initiatory phases: Interruption, Interring, Instruction, Integration. Essentially the process requires transformation and passage. It is a spiral path, an infinite cycle of seeking and finding growth at every stage, one that rests in approaching expansion and reflecting on conflict through the panorama of cooperation, creativity and competence. This labyrinth of a journey has been an amplification of my vital energy and my ‘multiverse of self’. Later on we shall dive deeper into what the ‘multiverse of self ‘ is within PKT and essentially Kalinda. I offer to do my best to usher in the words to aptly describe the adept biosphere of this sacred martial tradition and ancient futuristic technology, Kalinda and how its existence gave birth to the formation of Philbert-Kalinda Technique for Dance and Performance. 

Maureen Warner-Lewis draws a wide range of connections across West Central Africa and Caribbean to Kalinda. Warner-Lewis’s work as well as the work of Dr. T.J. Desch Obi provides numerous references to steer connections to West Central Africa, specifically Kongo/Angola (inclusive of Bakongo practices) culture and cosmology through language, spiritual practice, lifestyle, ceremony/ritual, martial tradition, and music. These connections span from and are not limited to Trinidad and Tobago, Haiti, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Jamaica, Barbados, Grenada, Guyana, Cuba, Brazil, Puerto Rico and New Orleans, Louisiana where syncretic iterations of this ritualised martial tradition form can be found under various names. Some of the familial forms of Kalinda (calinda/kalenda) include capoeira, ladja/damnye, stick-licking, knocking and kicking, mayole, gwo ka, kumina, tambu, bomba, rhumba, and mosoundi.  

In the context of Trinidad and Tobago’s Kalinda complex there are consistencies in the performance of martial dance, drumming, proverbial chants called lavways, ritual and stick fighting. The stick in Kalinda is referred to as a bois, French derived or bwa, a Trinidad patois word meaning wood or tree. Although the bwa is the primary witnessed instrument of the public engagement of stick fighting, it is important to recognize the advances and morphology in its ‘suite’ (Benjamin, Rondel, (2019) Interview. Conducted by Jamie Philbert).  Rondel Benjamin explains that the ‘kalinda suite’ (Benjamin 2019) can be an expression of the practice through whip, cutlass, glass bottle, icepick, razor, belt buckle, stick fighting and anything within the range of these dexterities. It is important to bear in mind the multiple connection and function of the bwa as a tree spirit, as this is where it has its inception, the spirit of the practitioner that moulds and prepares it and the one who wields it in battle. Because of these curious and cautionary layers to the bois’s identity, it may help to understand that in context it also wands, wards and intercepts energy. The bois is altogether something to play stick or Kalinda with and nothing to be played with at all. 

The sacred space of play for traditional Kalinda is named ‘gayelle’ which reproduces a derivation of the Spanish word, gallera which means ‘cockpit’ or a cockfighting space. A gayelle purports to describe the architectural space as well as the participants gathered as observers that are held by and support it. Because much evidence directs toward this West Central Africa Kongo relation with Kalinda , it makes sense for me to peer deeply into sensations of their relatability. In doing so I have found that the gayelle is also an architectural mirror of the dikenga or Bakongo cosmogram.

The ritualistic and spiritual livingness of these sacred geographies extend in a plethora of directions so we'll take our time. 

What is certain for me is that Kalinda is more than just the codified language of stick fight. It is the engagement of a physical and metaphorical gayelle or an arena in which one must engage in battle, a battle in which the goal is to become more competent through various competing forces. Metaphorically, the gayelle operates as a gravitational wave in the way it connects to the combatants, chantwell, lavway, drum rhythms, people of gayelle and ripples throughout the identity of its landscape. Scientifically, gravitational waves are vibrational interruptions within spacetime, produced by accelerated masses, that outwardly propagate as waves at the speed of light (Bieri, Garfinkle, Yunes 2017, p. 693). In sharing this definition, I seek to emphasise the expansiveness of the gayelle, Kalinda and its operational connectivity to the spiral. Spirals are symbolic of the eternity of life and are represented through cyclical phases, nature, ancient construction such as labyrinths, and the human body. 

The Kikongo word, dikenga dia Kôngo (Fu-Kiau 1969, 1980, 1991) or BaKongo cosmogram encompasses the turning over of paths or life transitions, through specific demarcations, Kala, being birth or emergence, Tukula, which essentially speaks to growth and achieving the heights of growth, Luvemba, which speaks to passing on tradition and passing away or death into the demarcation of Musoni, the ancestral place or the space of knowledge. The spirals of the gayelle are relative to the spiral that is created within the BaKôngo cosmogram. The entanglement of these concepts are important because of its deeper insights to Trinidad and Tobago’s Kalinda and are careful inspirations to the construction of the Philbert-Kalinda Technique for dance and performance or PKT.

Philbert-Kalinda Technique for Dance and Performance or PKT is a name I adamantly resisted for what I was gifted and not given, as a foundation for the pioneering of an artistic safe house and vehicle for Kalinda to breathe into being, new life forms of Caribbean diaspora art, artists and artistic spaces. I make the distinction between being gifted and not given this foundation because for all intents and purposes I dare not feel entitled in my accessibility to this work. I am the founder of this technique but history, and humility continues to enlighten me on this journey of creation. There have been others before me, like the Kalinda ancestors, practitioners and elders of Moruga. 

I am forever grateful for the mapping, spiralling and untying of this creation which rests with two of my consummate elders present in my Kalinda practice and also the co-creators of PKT, King Rondel Benjamin and King David Matthew Brown. There is the giant artistic soul, Tony Hall of Trinidad and Tobago who was the first to academically commission and support the beginning workings of these conceptualizations and implementation of PKT through his theatre lectures and teachings with Trinity College at University of West Indies (Trinidad and Tobago).  I draw your attention to these individuals, give thanks and pour my words as libation to their works and deeds because they represent and define a particular giftedness that contributes to the ethos and life of this technique. When I think about being gifted, I think about the dignified staggering melody of Dr. Nina Simone’s ‘To be young, gifted and black’. I now understand the giftedness of which she sang, mimicking the words of her dear friend Lorraine Hansberry as a spiritual giftedness, a protected and protective transcendence, a response-ability, a giftedness that requires balance, off centredness and determination. This is the gift of these three aforementioned African-Caribbean diaspora men. This is the gift of Kalinda. This is the kind of giftedness that is given through the theory and practice of PKT.

   If I look at the grouping of the letters PKT with a ‘Suzanne Cesaire eye’, the same eye that co-founded the cultural journal, Tropiques, understood the Caribbean as a plant body and inverted colonialism on its back and opened its head to see the reality presented to her backwards into surreal forwards, I see PKT as a picket. I see PKT as a picket fence, a military picket, a pique, a piquete. I see PKT as the vehicle that honks lavways as prayers and praises the deadly work of Kalinda practitioners and legends like Learie Pickett. A picket is a border, a doorway, a fence, a junction, a crossroad or a liminal acting space, body, or artistic work, process or performance. The academic and artistic application of PKT offers a space of coming and going and coming back in and each time with a new emergence and incubations of knowledge daring to live. It is a crossing space where the work guides you to return to self. A military picket describes soldiers stationed ahead of a main force. PKT is a door, a soldiering space towards performance that signals the landscape, philosophies, traditions, cartographies and geographies of Kalinda through martial movement, theatre, writing, speech sound, drumming, film and visual art. PKT chants out that sticks and stones do break bones and reveal to revive ancestral bloodlines. It reclaims that our words, music, art and movement may also do considerable harm to oppressive systems that have attempted to rub up against the trauma resilient forms of African Caribbean futuristic technologies such as Kalinda. 

    Kalinda societies or spaces can be secret, humble, victorious, transient, sacred spaces. As with many martial art traditions, Kalinda itself is a way of life and it is also a secret society. It is with permission from my elders that I share some of these concepts. The confidential nature of Kalinda societies and my allegiance and integrity in this practice has also given me considerable pause in sharing PKT publicly. The irony of my hesitance is that it poses another conflict which as I stated at the beginning of our walk into these musings is an energetic character of Kalinda. Thus, I am charged by my own convictions to live fully through to the heights of creativity and competence available in this confrontation. 

 From what I have witnessed and experienced through my own practice of Kalinda it is an infinite source for strategic freedom living. Ironically, this strategy for freedom through living is realised through continuous cycles of emergence and the honouring of death. As my elder in Kalinda and co-creator of PKT, King Rondel Benjamin often states ‘being beautiful in the face of death’ is paramount in living as a Kalinda practitioner. His words vibrate as the deep acknowledgement that the surety of death requires the practice of beauty in life and such is a major premise of self governance under this living. Whether it be fashion, oral traditions, recreational play, competitive play, serious play, speech, sound composition, improvisation/freestyle, music, visual art, dance, agriculture, linguistics, ritual generation, entrepreneurship or healing practices, Kalinda is an ecosystem that presents grounding in each of these practices . 

Historically, there has always been the sincere foundation of creative intelligence at the core of Kalinda, its people and its communities. Since the 17th century, Kalinda yards and bands have been founding pioneers of today’s Carnival celebrations, the carnivalesque, jouvay, and inspiration for a number of traditional mas, social, political, ritualistic warfare and artistic practices in Trinidad and Tobago and other Caribbean diaspora spaces.  The practice of beauty within these forms mentioned and its predecessor may be perceived as a mere aesthetic yet it is more firmly rooted in the interruptions and thereby maintenance of this beauty. Like life, beauty is cyclical and requires space to just be, grow, die, and harvest itself for rebirth. 

Approaching conflict in PKT is much like this idea of beauty and means that one is willing to accept the call of risk and/or reward. This approach is grounded in the epistemology of Kalinda’s technology. PKT through the lens of Trinidad and Tobago's Kalinda seeks to explore a myriad of self, coined the ‘multiverse of self’: bois/bwa or stick (or any living object in emulation of bwa such as bandana, scarf or skirt, etc.) as extended self or bois self, present self, future self, shadow/jumbi self, mirrored self, community self and ancestral or spirit self. These explorations of self are textured by deeper inquiries in self concept, self esteem, self as an activity, self as a narrative centre of gravity/gayelle, self as all and self consumption. Throughout the application of the technique these concepts are discovered and grasped through isolated and full body movement, visual arts, writing, speech/sound, theatre exercises, a range of improvisational approaches and conflict reconciliation. 

   Philbert- Kalinda Technique for Dance and Performance grounds the consumption of images, sound, and shape as a roadway to attaining various forms of identity. For it can be evidenced that what we see, taste, hear, touch, smell or sense informs and arranges our cultural, social and spiritual existence. Throughout each portion of our existence we are published within our development and growth. We are ‘humanuscripts’, a phrase that comes to spirit, to mind and ignites to describe that humanity not only produces text yet the pre-colonial and emergence of the Black Atlantic experience has proven that the humans most deeply affected by that experience are indeed living text, breath of life manuscripts of unrevealed revelations. They are the felt and spoken words in human flesh. The evidence towards this is overwhelming and the life of PKT explores performance from this view. What does it mean to be a performing living humanuscript?

Kalinda is present for me as an African-Caribbean futurism, a self organising system, a manifestation of understanding being.  It is a technology of the African diaspora that seeks to uncover self and PKT is a child, a technique of that technology or system. If there were one thought or idea to express how I feel about the effectiveness of Kalinda, PKT, the gayelle and the multiverse of self it would be “... described in the Bantu-Kongo word for person, muntu is a ‘set of concrete social relationships’ ... a system of systems; the pattern of patterns in being” (Fu Kiau 2001, p. 42 ). The person is contextualised as a system participating in other systems, a pattern, a ripple that is sourced and from a source.” (Fu-Kiau 2001, p.  42). This is a fundamental key component to how PKT is designed as a system of systems, patterns within patterns. 

German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1977) states that technology must be understood as a way of revealing (Heidegger 1977, p. 4). Aletheuein, a Greek word meaning to discover-to uncover what was covered expresses an attribute accessed in PKT where one may find the revelation of roles, identity and character through speech/sound/vocal invocation, martial movement, the undoing of suppression and new sensing of the empirical of the somatic and extrasomatic through movement, writing, visual arts, ritual and theatre exercises. In PKT, there exists an "open gayelle", a space in which one finds their dance. Welcome. 

References:

Benjamin, Rondel 2019 Interview with Jamie J. Philbert, [In person]

Bieri, L., Garfinkle, D., & Yunes, N. (2017). ‘Gravitational Waves and Their Mathematics’. arXiv: General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology.

Fu-Kiau Kia Bunseki-Lumanisa A. (2001). ‘African Cosmology Of The Bântu-Kôngo: Tying The Spiritual Knot : Principles Of Life & Living’ ([2nd printing]). Athelia Henrietta Press publ. in the name of Orunmila.

Heidegger, Martin. (1977) ‘The Question Concerning Technology’. Edited by William Lovitt, Harper & Row New York.

Somé, Malidoma Patrice. (1998) ‘The Healing Wisdom Of Africa : Finding Life Purpose Through Nature Ritual And Community’. Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam.