Ladja (Danmyé)
The combat dance of Martinique, kin to capoeira. The fight takes place in a ring to the beat of a drum; the rhythm decides what may happen there.
Quick Facts
MartiniqueCharacter & Origin
Organisation & Competition
What the style is built from
Editorial rating on a 0–3 scale, based on how much room each area gets in ordinary training.
Catalogs & Databases for Ladja (Danmyé)
About Ladja (Danmyé)
Ladja, known on Martinique also as danmyé, is the combat dance of the French Antilles. It arose among enslaved Africans brought to the island and belongs to the same family as Brazilian capoeira or Cuban maní: the fighting is done in a ring of onlookers, to the accompaniment of the tanbou drum and of a lead singer to whom a chorus answers. The rhythm decides what happens in the ring, and the passage between dance and fight is continuous. The technical content consists of kicks delivered low and high, sweeps, head work, gripping and takedowns; movements from the ground and turns that serve at once for attack and evasion are frequent. Ladja and danmyé are two names for close but not quite identical forms: danmyé is usually used for the more combative form and ladja for the more ceremonial and spectacular one, though the boundary is not sharp and practitioners themselves read it differently. In the colonial period the art was suppressed and by the middle of the twentieth century it had almost died out. It was revived from the 1980s as part of the bèlè movement, which restores Martinican culture. Among the most valuable records are those of the American dancer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham, who documented ladja on Martinique in the 1930s and made a ballet from it in 1938.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.