The solo was followed by a vignette in which three of the musicians joined the work’s five core dancers center stage, improvising riffs that the dancers spontaneously composed into movement. It was a call-and-response, where each dancer acted as another musician, using their physical instrument to play a complementary tune to what they had heard. It was a delightful exchange.  

While many of the work’s early vignettes were upbeat and pertained to social gatherings, including a wedding and a nightclub outing, several of its most memorable vignettes explored more contemplative and difficult subject matter.

In a section entitled “Sacred Sounds/God’s Sunrise,” McIntyre, in a voiceover, told of receiving an audiotape recording from a friend of a ceremony she had attended in Morocco and how that music was elevated like the music she heard in clubs and concerts. “Then I knew this music I was loving was divine,” said McIntyre. “It came from a place of sacredness.” Illustrating her words, the company’s dancers, costumed in long black robes, sculpted the space around them as if executing a dance version of a martial arts kata. They reflected in their movements the sacredness McIntyre spoke of. 

Next, flutist Cleave Guyton Jr. accompanied dancer Demetia Hopkins, who performed a measured solo with a ceremonial feel in the vignette, “box & pole,” named after a Shange poem. In it, Hopkins breathily proclaimed as she danced, “We must make totems, how else can the spirits feel us,” and “We must worship ourselves that the earth not be defiled by our neglect.” Her graceful and gestural movements were captivating. So too was the vignette “Silent Duet” that followed.