2025 (ongoing) Kuoona

Kuoona is a short music and screen-dance film that inaugurates a new genre—Gullah Piano—a sonic fusion of Gullah polyrhythms, 18th–20th century African American spirituals, Southern Black revival, Amapiano, and Afrobeats. The choreography blends Gullah shout footwork, African American vernacular dance, hip hop, and Amapiano, mapping an embodied archive of resistance.

Framed through the consciousness of an AI trained on Gullah polyrhythms, the film centers a moment during the 1739 Stono Rebellion, where insurgents pause to conduct a sacred drumming ritual. Though this act contributes to the revolt’s unraveling, it simultaneously activates Gullah space-time—a cosmological plane where past, present, and future converge through rhythm, libation, and encoded movement.

The name Kuoona is a portmanteau of the Gullah word oona—to perceive or address a group —and the Bantu word kuona, meaning to see, perceive,or to look at as spoken across Swahili, Chichewa, and Kikongo. The film introduces Gullah Piano with a sonic call that both hails fellow Gullahs and reaches across Bantu-speaking cultures, signaling a cross-cultural invocation for collaboration rooted in shared cosmological rhythm.

As the drumbeat reverberates across time, we follow a series of dancers—a church congregation, a hip hop artist, freedom marchers—all moved by the same ancestral pulse. Their choreography becomes both portal and prayer, culminating in a final church scene that signals not an ending, but a return.