Mexican artist Vargas-Suarez Universal is often mistaken for a collective, and indeed his practice—which uses sound, science and the archives of organizations ranging from the Queens Museum to NASA—is as varied as any many-authored project.

Novelist and poet Evelyne Trouillot comes from a prominent Port-au-Prince family of writers and intellectuals. Novelist Edwidge Danticat queried the writer on Haiti’s past and its future.

Carlos Eire, a professor of history and religion at Yale, won a National Book Award for his first nonhistorical effort, Waiting for Snow in Havana, his memoir of a privileged childhood in Cuba disrupted by the revolution.

Damas “Fanfan” Louis is both master drummer and houngan asogwe, high priest of Vodou. The painter Michael Zwack, caught up with him in New York to discuss Haitian rhythms and Fanfan’s involvement in a cultural center for dance, drums and Vodou.

In his latest film, Ama: The Memory of Time, Salvadoran poet and filmmaker Daniel Flores y Ascencio records the oral history of shaman Don Juan Ama, who witnessed the murder of his uncle, the leader of a 1932 indigenous revolt in El Salvador.

Haitian choreographer and drummer Peniel Guerrier was trained in traditional Haitian and African movement, and his choreographies acknowledge each tradition’s rhythms and rituals while fusing them in unexpected ways.

The Practice + Theory series is sponsored in part by the Frances Dittmer Family Foundation.

The Practice + Theory series is sponsored in part by the Frances Dittmer Family Foundation.

The doorbell interrupted suddenly as Fiona fastened the last garter snap for her black stockings. She jumped to the floor, landing on her high heels, and hurried a few steps toward the door.

That night, Sophonie conceived at the height of the downpour. 

Sometime in the late 1990s, when I was touring the Cap Haïtien area in a rented 4×4, I was asked to transport a friend of a friend, who had been victim of a spiritual attack, for treatment at the house of a bokor somewhere among the low-lying cane fields of the Plaine du Nord. 

Maksaens Denis, a multimedia artist from Haiti who divides his time between Port-au-Prince and Paris, is also a dj and vj who comes from a classical music background. Appropriately, what might first appear to be unwieldy about his work has the exactitude of classical composition.