Manbo Ayizan on a New York Stage

This intimate diaristic article illuminates how lauded modern/contemporary dancer Roxane D'Orléans Juste resourcefully tapped into what she terms "movement intelligence" to embody a priestess who channeled the divine in the 2014 choreography She Who Carries the Sky. Inspired in part by Edwidge Danticat's book Breath, Eyes, Memory, D'Orléans Juste became the spiritual realm's conduit through what she calls "knowing and sensing with the body, allowing environments and people to be mutually affective, and drawing from this knowledge to thread movements that animate the message the body projects." Born in Québec to a French Canadian mother and a Haitian father, the performer underwent rigorous training in dance and academic studies in Haiti, Canada, the United States, and Europe, becoming a staple of the United States' prestigious Limón Dance Company from 1983 to 2016. D'Orléans Juste was the company's associate artistic director when she devised the piece with McIntyre. Limón's then artistic director Carla Maxwell commissioned the choreography for D'Orléans Juste to commemorate her thirty-year tenure with the company

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