PHILBERT-KALINDA TECHNIQUE (P.K.T) for Dance and Performance:

https://www.jamiephilbert.com/scholarship

Architecture, archive, and conflict are all storytellers. When we speak of conflict, architecture and archive we are summoning stories, narratives, spaces, memory, matter and matters, identity, construction, deconstruction, destruction, creation, performance, performation (Yeow A., Faraj S., 18) permanence and non-permanence (temporality), plurality into singularity, singularity into plurality, existence and non existence, collaboration, competence, procession, migration, inhabitation, literacy or the ability to read language in its various modes. Architecture and archive communicates that conflict is both master builder and librarian. Conflict as master builder and librarian provides information, keeps record and regenerates new ideas into being. So how do we enable the skill of over-standing conflict in favour of our purpose and even simpler in our everyday lives?

Conflict when viewed as a linear experience is often perceived as unpleasant or with negative connotations. It is generally hinged to the ideologies of violence and regarded as a social dis-ease. What if we viewed conflict as matter, or the matters we encounter as mother? A space that was actually meant by nature to nurture life and growth. What if we understood archive as matter, as mother? Kalinda is mother, an archival and architectural mothership in which conflict becomes a transformative space that relegates the its liminality into collaboration or cooperation (Rondel Benjamin, No Bois Man, No ‘Fraid, 2012), creativity and competence. In the embodied practice and livingness of Kalinda, we understand competition sans a Western lens yet through an ancient Afro-Caribbean futurism sensibility. Competition is the ability to make each party involved in the realm of conflict more competent than when they arrived. The appropriate accessing of ancestral technologies such as Kalinda from initiated guides that reside within its practice and livingness may give way to ancient embodied knowledge of how ritual war has worked for centuries build balanced, grounded and specialised beings. Dr. Bunseki Fu Kiau describes such a being in Kongo terms as ‘muntu’, one who also operates as “the second sun”, we must “rise as the sun in order to become, to light fire” (Fu Kiau, 26). As we begin to understand conflict as architecture and archive we see that the rising and falling action of its foundation is predicated on the ability to shift, seeing the inner/outer workings of self and the sub apparatuses that allow change to unfold. For as Octavia Butler says, “All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change.”

- Jamie J. Philbert. 2022. Philbert-Kalinda Technique for dance and performance: Conflict as Architecture and Archive. excerpt.

P.K.T. sessions on Conflict as Architecture and Archive have been taught by Jamie J. Philbert/Bois Academy of Trinidad and Tobago to the following accredited universities:

Norwegian Theatre Academy, MA Performance (September 26-30, 2022, Norway)

Wayne State University, Department of Theatre and Dance (July-August 2022, Tobago)