Prayer Dance

In her fascinatingly eclectic, yet technically lagging, dance performance, “Bird of Pray,” Andrea Woods took nakedness to an extreme level. She not only exposed her body, her family ties, and her African-American culture; she accomplished it through an array of media. “Bird of Pray,” set to Chris DeRosa’s and Caco Oliveira’s percussion, is alternatively a dance performance or a video projection, or sometimes a combination of the two.

In one of the video projections, Woods quickly walked in the frame on a bare gymnasium floor. Completely naked, she energetically contorted her body, arching it from one side to the next, to the insistent beat of an African drum. Then she suddenly twirled around, her head and arms facing skyward as though in self-sacrifice. Gradually, the film became jerkier as cuts are multiplied, and takes are repeated over and over again.

As if this hadn’t been a complete enough show of nakedness, immediately following the projection, Woods paced on stage stark naked and stood defiantly under the spotlight. To her right a portly African-American woman was poised in front of a pulpit. In a joyful preacher’s tone, she read out Hattie Gossett’s poem “Bird of Pray.” In the poem, the bird, which flies free and laughs at its former oppressor, symbolizes the modern African-American community.

As though set in motion by the resonant voice, Woods half-mimed, half-danced the poem. She undulated her arms upward as though she was a bird pushing against the air in order to ascend. On the words, “we massage the ground with our feet,” she forced the balls of her feet into the ground. At other times, she threw her torso down or kneeled on the floor, arching her back like a proud warrior.

This pull towards the ground is characteristic of the dancing in “Bird of Pray.” Woods—and the two other dancers, Christopher Campbell and Felicia Swoop, who accompanied her during a short portion of the performance—exhibited African dance edged by martial arts movements. The dancers’ bodies seemed rooted to the stage; their knees were bent as though burdened by their weight. They crouched and thrust their elbows or thrashed high kicks.

Unfortunately, the dancers’ connection to the ground was constant. Even during her jumps in “Bird of Pray,” Woods never seemed to leave the ground. Her torso consistently stayed at the same height, while her legs barely had the time to unbend upon landing. When spinning on tiptoes, her body faltered as if it was on the brink of toppling over.

Though not astounding to watch, the dancing suited the performance. It exuded the same like-it-or-not self-confidence that the rest of the package did. Woods’ defiant stage presence was particularly felt when, after a short dance sequence amid projected candles, she marched onto the stage in a blue robe. She puts a few papers on the pulpit and proceeds to lecture the audience on blues singer Bessie Smith and how Smith’s songs depict the hardships of the African-American community in the 1920s.

Throughout the exhibition, Woods never ceased to challenge us to follow her in her mission to express her identity through an eclectic and complex language. She exposed fragments of her identity, and the audience was left to piece them together.