Kréol Fest — A Night for the Mixture to Move

A celebration of Creole culture, language, and lineage—where diaspora remembers itself in rhythm.

The Spark 

It didn’t start as a definition. It’s the question that’s shadowed Natie through airports, rehearsal halls, and green rooms for over a decade.

Natie is a singer, songwriter, and violinist from Réunion Island—raised between her father’s jazz and her mother’s Spanish folk records. Trained in classical music yet fluent in improvisation, she treats genre as language: a way to translate the island’s blend of histories into sound. Now based in New York, she channels that same mix of roots and reinvention into Kréol Fest.

What are you? She’d usually answer “French” to make things simple. But when she said

“Creole,” the word would flatten—into New Orleans spice, a dialect, a shrug. So she decided: let people feel it first.

“I’m not a historian or a politician,” she says. “I’m an artist. The best way to answer was to offer an experience.”

At first, Kréol Fest was meant to spotlight one point of origin at a time—beginning with Réunion, where she grew up. But a conversation with a second-generation Haitian musician—“People from Réunion aren’t Creole”—landed hard. If even close cousins in history couldn’t see each other, the festival needed to be interconnected, not isolated.

The vision shifted: bring multiple Creole worlds into one room so the intersections, frictions, and kinships could be felt.

The long view? To one day send artists across oceans—Haiti to Cabo Verde, Jamaica to Réunion—to make new collaborative work that speaks in many tongues at once.

Why Brooklyn, Why Now

Natie came to New York expecting to find a melting pot. Over time she realized a quieter truth: maybe the truest melting pot was home all along. Réunion—French in passport, Creole in heartbeat—had always made mixture an everyday practice.But New York offers something else: proximity to artists from across the Creole world, shoulder to shoulder. Kréol Fest is where those two realities meet.

There’s a phrase she carries from home: Viv Ansanm — live together. Kréol Fest is that, in practice.

Act I — Language

The evening opens in sound.Before a single note, you’ll hear it—the chorus of accents, the pulse of translation.Spanish, Kreyòl, French, and the many Creoles in between—all testing their edges, remembering where they come from.

A little rum, a little reverb, a little remembering.

Opening Lens — Dr. Dantaé Garee Elliott (NYU):A visiting professor in NYU’s Department of Spanish & Portuguese, Dr. Elliott studies diaspora memory and material life. Her dissertation, Barrel Poetics, examines Caribbean barrel culture—the blue drums that carry clothes, books, spices, hope—how families ship pieces of home across oceans. Tonight she extends that idea: words as cargo, memory as what we ship forward. To speak Creole, she reminds us, is to speak in survival.

Yaissa Jiménez — Poet (Dominican Republic):The mic passes to Yaissa, whose work carries the weather of Los Mina—a community founded by Black maroons—into the present. She calls herself a “Black-mouthed Caribbean punk,” but what you’ll feel is ritual: language as protection, everyday life turned ceremony. Expect Spanish stretching toward Kreyòl, salt and sweetness in the same line—a reminder that poetry can be altar and shield.

Okai Musik — Percussion (Haiti → Brooklyn):Brooklyn-born to Haitian parents, Okai translates the diaspora through percussion—hands bridging Vodou, bomba, and rumba into one living rhythm. Each strike folds folktale into heartbeat, turning the courtyard into call-and-response.

Liana Chin — Afro-Jazz (Jamaica):Sax in hand, Liana guides the room into improvisation—fluid, searching. Her set moves between Kingston and New York, translating memory into melody: a conversation between breath and brass.

Act I closes on a feeling: every accent reaching for the same thing — recognition.When words finally overflow, what’s left is pulse.That’s where Act II begins.

Act II — Spirituality

The lights soften; conversation thins to a hush. This act isn’t about doctrine—it’s about how people carry the sacred.

Frame — Dr. Elliott:Faith as inheritance, she offers. In the Creole world, the sacred and the everyday have never lived far apart. To pray is to remember.

Olivia K — Voice (Guyana → BK):A Guyanese-American vocalist and bandleader, Olivia moves between soul and folk while threading in Guyanese folk motifs she’s intent on keeping alive. Expect melody that feels like recognition—vowels turning into vibration, heritage as present tense.

Prince AC — Shatta (Jamaica):Bass warms the floorboards. Prince AC steps in, and movement becomes a language of its own—hips, shoulders, feet, defiance. Natie knew she needed Shatta the minute her niece was blasting it in the car back home—youth design language, rebellion and heritage coded in the same beat. Prince AC’s performance feels like body theology—movement as sermon, rhythm as scripture.

Linda EPO — Voice (Haiti):Without fanfare, Linda’s voice enters like light on smoke—tender and unmissable. Kreyòl gospel hues seep through her phrasing as she moves across languages and lands, carrying both ache and uplift. Hands rise without instruction.

By the end, the room hums with something communal—not spectacle, surrender.What begins as performance feels closer to possession.

Act III — Community

Community here isn’t a buzzword—it’s the work of witnessing one another.

Opening Note — Why We Gather: Kréol Fest was built for moments people told Natie after year one: “I felt seen for the first time outside my motherland.” In New York’s mosaic, communities often live next to each other. Tonight, they live with each other.

Kareem — Steel Pan (Trinidad & Tobago):Metal and melody bloom at once—bright, precise, celebratory. Steel pan writes a street-corner sunrise into the night.

Negesti — Carnival Line Dance (T&T):Five minutes of choreography, infinite permission. A line becomes a wave; strangers become neighbors.

Aleksand Saya — DJ (Réunion Island → France) — Closing Set:This is the full-circle moment. As a child, Natie’s father was exiled from Réunion to France during a government crackdown on the Communist movement—barred from returning until adulthood. When he finally did, he helped fuse maloya with jazz and early electronics, reshaping tradition by opening it.Aleksand Saya carries that lineage forward: a Réunionnese DJ who blends maloya’s ancestral percussion with global electronic pulse. Natie still grins when she holds up his vinyl; it’s his first time playing in the U.S., flying in to close the night. What you’ll hear is continuity made kinetic—heritage as present tense, history remixed for the dance floor.

Encore — Kréol Ron / Cypher / Open Mic:The line between audience and artist dissolves. Call meets response; chorus becomes community.

Coda — The Bridge We Build

Kréol Fest is an answer—but also a beginning. The plan from here is outward: artists crossing oceans—Haiti to Cabo Verde, Jamaica to Réunion—making new work that speaks in harmonies only collaboration can write.

By night’s end, the rhythm spills beyond the stage: into the scent of simmering curries and stews, into hands tracing henna and fabric, into tables lined with books, jewelry, and plants that remember where we’ve been. Here, food is archive, cloth is language, care is inheritance.

And the quiet mantra beneath it all is the one Natie brought from home: Viv Ansanm. Live together.

For one night in Bed-Stuy—under pink lights, rum, and flowers—we practice it, so it’s easier to carry tomorrow.

Event Details

Date: Sun, Oct 26 · 4:00 PM (GMT-4)Venue: Café Erzulie (Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn)Run of Show: Three Acts — Language · Spirituality · Community with intermissions for vendors, raffle, and mingling. DJ Saya closes. Open-mic encore.

Tickets :