GREAT BAY, St. Martin (December 28, 1999) — On Monday, December 27, 1999, an audience of over 2000 people saw the Ponum, St. Martin’s national dance, performed at the amphitheater on Marigot’s Waterfront.
Choreographer Clara Reyes and Ponum documentary film director Fabian Badejo were themselves amazed by the constant showering of applause from the audience throughout the show. They also pointed out that the 10 dancers rose to the occasion like never before on the wave of Ponum excitement which caught up the audience attending the millennium-end festivity.
The day before, Reyes, Badejo, and the Ponum dancers and drummers concluded what turned out to be a tough, almost grueling Sunday of filming the historic dance for the documentary. A few onlookers did stop by the film set on Sunday but no how compared to the audience and the overwhelming response that the dancers and An ri la drummers seemed to draw from at the open air venue on Monday night.
Badejo says that the St. Martin people might have seen themselves in the dance in a variety of powerful and beautiful ways, and that is probably why the response was so strong and joyous. “After a while it looked like the dancers couldn’t do anything wrong. First I was concerned about whether the people were going to be able to follow the story-line of the dance but apparently that was not a problem.”
After the performance, Reyes, who also danced, explained to the audience about the opening and three main movements of the dance: the African dream sequence, the slavery/maroon segment, the 1848 emancipation period; and when the dance emerged in the 20th century as a party dance.
Reyes drew from historical documents, folklore, interviews with elderly St. Martiners, and earlier Ponum “studies” to develop her unique and dramatic choreography, which is commissioned by House of Nehesi of Publishers Foundation as the centerpiece of the Ponum documentary film.
The Monday night festivity was one of the island’s millennium-end cultural performances that will conclude at the Waterfront on Old Year’s night.