Deydey is a multimedia exploration of storytelling and ancestral recovery. Rooted in a reclamation of family knowledge disrupted by generational gaps, the narrative unfolds through the spatial-temporal philosophy of the Gullah ring shout. Grounded in oral histories from elders in my family, the work weaves together hand-drawn compositions, dance, photography, and film to trace the contours of ancestral knowledge through embodied gesture.

At the heart of this project is a childhood memory of my great aunt participating in a Gullah burial tradition—being passed over the grave, along with her brother to mark the release of an elder and the arrival of a new generation. This memory anchors a hand-drawn visualization that explores the significance of circles and cycles within Gullah conceptions of time, space, life, death, and the divine—an abstract composition of overlapping loops that reflects an interconnected cosmology. The drawing functions as both a conceptual map and a kinetic score, guiding a series of movement-based gestures that translate these beliefs into embodied language.

Through dance, my body echoes sacred forms of geometry that influenced my upbringing. The choreography tells a deeply personal narrative, reflecting the discrete laws of life within my family lineage. Still images from the dance capture key gestural moments, preserving them as visual artifacts of movement.