VISION
JAE shares the liberating power of Haitian-folkloric dance to cultivate hope and healing towards a more expressive and socially just world.
MISSION
Jean Appolon Expressions (JAE) is a contemporary dance company deeply rooted in Haitian-folkloric culture that celebrates, nurtures, and empowers a global community. We accomplish this through professional performances, teaching, and fostering healing and the joy of movement in people of all ages, abilities, and backgrounds to contribute to a socially just world.
STATEMENT ON CULTURAL EQUITY
Read JAE’s Statement on Cultural Equity, an integral part of our work as an organization.
Professional Company
Jean Appolon explores themes that are vital to the Haitian and Haitian-American experience as he continuously evolves Haitian-contemporary dance. His movement has deep roots in Haitian folkloric dance that enable it to grow as Jean collaborates with the JAE company professional dancers and other artists in the fields of music, visual art, and more. Read about how the company impacts its audiences.
Education
Jean and the JAE company dancers bring years of experience in education. They take great joy in working with young dancers in a wide range of programs: school-based partnerships, intensives, weekly classes, and the ongoing Teen Apprentice Program. These programs are guided by the belief that we can all dance, and can learn about ourselves and one another when we dance together.
Haiti-Boston Connection
Even as disease and unrest make it more difficult to dance together in one place, JAE connects to dancers and community partners in Haiti and Boston. Read about how video and internet enable us to continue to learn and even perform together.
Community
From weekly classes in Cambridge to workshops with community organizations in the greater Boston-area, JAE gives movers and thinkers of all backgrounds the opportunity to learn about Haitian culture and their own healing by participating in dance and conversation.
Telling Haiti's story
Based in Boston, JAE is a Haitian contemporary dance company, directed by Jean Appolon. Combining Modern technique and Haitian folkloric dance, JAE brings a new artistic vernacular to its audiences. With its dynamic repertoire, JAE educates audiences about Haitian culture, traditions, history and current issues. JAE fulfills its mission to preserve Haitian folkloric culture while constantly enlivening the art form in a way that is vital, accessible, inspiring, and educational. JAE is comprised of dancers from diverse backgrounds, each of whom who are committed to JAE’s mission to use dance to share Haitian culture. For more information or to book a performance, please click here.
The company has been showcased in major arts venues globally, and continues to share its artistry in accessible, inclusive ways through free performances in locations like city parks and community spaces. JAE also has performed at many colleges and universities, including Harvard University, Lesley College, and Wheaton College. JAE has been fortunate to share the stage with celebrities such as Danny Glover, Henry Louis Gates, and Edwidge Danticat, and to collaborate with community partners such as Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción (IBA) and Central Square Theater.
Afro-Haitian Dance
Afro-Haitian dance has greatly influenced the Modern dance world, largely through the research and exposure of Modern dance icon Katherine Dunham. Haiti captured Dunham’s heart in the 1930s, when she arrived as a dancer and anthropologist to study the country’s culture, history and, particularly, its dance. Dunham, in turn, captured the hearts of Haitians by making the dances of Haiti and the Caribbean internationally known. Now, the “folklorization” of Haitian dance allows both religious and social dances to travel and be performed in the secular context of the proscenium stage. Jean Appolon Expressions is not strictly a Haitian Folkloric company, but rather seeks to preserve Haitian folkloric dance and music through contemporary interpretations.
JAE has performed at the Boston Center for the Arts, the Institute for Contemporary Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Harlem School of the Arts, numerous community festivals and several universities, just to name a few.