Jean-Leon Destine, father of Haitian professional dance, dies at 94

Jean-Leon Destine died in Manhattan on this day. He was born in Saint-Marc on 26 March 1918 and left Haiti in the early 1940s with Lina Mathon-Blanchet’s company, then studied at Howard University. He danced with Katherine Dunham, built the Destine Afro-Haitian Dance Company, and founded Haiti’s national dance troupe in the late 1940s. His signature piece was Slave Dance. He took the movement of the lakou and the peristyle onto concert stages in New York and called it what it was: Haitian.