As in “Nia” and “Steps” and many of Brown’s pieces, “Grace” features unison groupwork with little breakaway solos, duos, trios, and quartets. But in “Grace” these subdivisions are narratively color-coded. The white and bright red costumes by Omotayo Wunmi Olaiya separate the angels from the wayward humans—who slowly lose their red shirts and sport all white too by the end of the piece. Caldwell, in the central Woman/God (or Mother God) role, was fantastic. She presided over the sinners’ conversions with a fiery gaze. Before the final processional in “Grace,” Caldwell’s Mother God was feistily confronted by Hamilton. It was a charged moment, as the rest of the cast watched her calm him down and then hug him. It was also choreographically shocking, because it was a pas de deux of sorts, and one of the evening’s few moments of human touch. It made me realize how self-contained and autonomous Brown’s dances are in general. The dancers’ bodies are very much their own, and they communicate foremost through their intimate partnership with the music—which is why they are all so vividly unique and yet so unified.       

While watching Lloyd Knight earlier this week, I was thinking about how Martha Graham’s vocabulary often looks like a body fighting an invisible opponent—the contracted blows, the proud jabs. Ballet too involves a constant battling of oppositional forces, as the legs turn out in different directions to summon energy to move from stationary positions (as in a pirouette from fifth position, for example). But the African style is largely about going with the flow. Sometimes the movements are initiated from the outside and work inward as the spine wiggles, the shoulders roll, and the hips sway in adjustment. Sometimes the movements stem from within and kick explosively outward, while the head tosses back and the limbs fling out to absorb the shockwaves. Unlike in Graham, a lower back contraction is almost always countered with a swing through to an extension, back and forth again and again—a rocking pelvic pendulum. Caldwell’s Woman/God did not need to resort to violence to lead her flock. The path to heaven was rhythmic; they only needed to get in her groove.