Braids & Heritage

Jossua Satinée & Stacey Désilier

Inhabited bodies, diasporic legacies and transmitted know-how. Jossua Satinée and Stacey Désilier weave a first joint work of luminous precision, where memory circulates alive through dance, from cakewalk to moonwalk, from twerk to hip-hop, from yesterday to now.

Driven by a partnership forged over years, this debut creation from the duo explores transmission, lineage, and multiple identities. The piece doesn't tell a story. It unravels the past and weaves connections to the present with the entities that permeate it. Dances rooted in Afro-descendant resistance movements activate virtuoso bodies, ancestral skills intersect with contemporary, inhabited trances, and pop and playful cultural references are subverted with keen insight.

Beneath the apparent lightness, deeper layers are revealed: buried histories, invisible memories, cultural territories traversed and reclaimed. The stage becomes a workshop, a sanctuary, a place of friction but also of homage and communion. The choreographic writing is precise, demanding, driven by an almost cosmic brotherhood between the two performer-choreographers; their relationship itself is a raw material.

Braids & Heritage celebrates metamorphosis as a necessity: transforming to survive while remembering. Making fluidity a strategy. Connection, a political act. A debut creation of immediate strength and maturity.

credits

Concept, choreography, performance, set design, and costume design: Jossua Satinée & Stacey Désilier. Music and sound design: Steven Doman. Lighting design: Paul Chambers. Lighting and set design assistance: Jordana Natale. Dramaturgy: Angélique Willkie. Technical direction: Samuel Thériault. Photography: Noire Mouliom & Vladim Vilain. Production: Jossua Satinée & Stacey Désilier. Executive production: Parbleux. Co-production and presentation: Festival TransAmériques – FTA (Montreal). Creative residencies: Centre de création O Vertigo (Montreal), L'Annexe-A (Rouyn-Noranda), Circuit-Est centre chorégraphique (Montreal). Creation support.
Open studio Parbleux, SummerWorks Festival, Fall for Dance North Festival. The creation of this work is made possible thanks to the financial support of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Conseil des arts de Montréal . Premiere presented in June 2026 as part of the Festival TransAmériques (Montreal).