UCSB Arts & Lectures presented Memphis Jookin’ phenomenon Lil Buck and street dance icon Jon Boogz with their company Movement Art Is (MAI) in “Love Heals All Wounds” on Jan. 22 at UCSB Campbell Hall.
The company of 11 expressive performers put a spotlight — via movement, spoken word, vibrant live violin and recorded music, video art and documentary footage — on the reality that being born poor and/or a person of color in the United States entails trauma, injustice and invisibility.
“Love Heals All Wounds” is propelled by poetic episodes performed by spoken word artist Robin Sanders in a human and cosmological mother role: “Love that is splendid, deeply rooted and perfect.”
It is punctuated and framed by live music composed and performed along with the dancers by violinist Jason Yang.
Five dancers performed flowing unison movement before images of fresh water. Visuals transformed to flood and pollution as the movement became sharper, with a final reference: Flint.
Sanders’ rhythmic reflection: “You see how injustice follows melanin and the poor.”
A soloist in white danced in upward balletic style, moving closer to the floor as a gas-masked figure in black encroached on the scene. Smoke.
Six dancers in red captured power and ferocity, performing hip hop movement vernacular to club-style music. Fire. “Tragedy has me vexed, sorely I lament,” Sanders recited.
Mother figure Sanders shared the stage with a group of male dancers. “Black boy, you bring me so much joy.”
Youthful vitality pervaded the movement and words that the men performed by turns. Fraternity step, Jookin, poppin’, hip hop styles connoted joyful brotherhood until the dance devolved to Buck and Boogz exiting the stage with their hands behind their backs. Arrested.
An affecting essay on the arc of slavery followed. Four dancers portrayed a shackled slave, a chain gang conscript, a man in contemporary street dress, and one of today’s mass incarcerated in an orange jumpsuit.
The piece concluded with a stunning moment: The dancers moved to the front of the stage, intimately close to the audience, and stood facing them unflinchingly, highlighting the impact of social injustice on the human level, while Sanders elegantly noted, “The system is broken when the convict can easily become the victim.”
Nine dancers faced one another from either side of a line of light down the center of the stage, making stylized movements of laying bricks. As Sanders noted, “you can never build a wall so tall it protects you from yourself.”
Boogz and Buck danced an affecting duet on either side of the invisible wall, unable to see, but each showing awareness of the other. They flung themselves at the invisible separator, sometimes banged against it, showing the reverberating force back through their arms.
In this quieter duet, we had time to absorb the nuanced fluttering fingers and seemingly ankle-less footwork of Buck’s Jookin and Boogz’ rolling, seeming jointless arms and fluid torso articuation.
Sanders’ words: “Let down your guard and feel. Only lay bricks that build bridges to connect us all.”
The group returned, dancing to music, facing the center “wall” from both sides. Shortly, those on either side broke through the center in silent slow motion as the audience watched the wall disappear.
Soon, Boogz and Buck danced being shot and fell to the ground as a voice on screen said, “Police shot an unarmed African-American man.”
Caution tape stretched across the stage. A passerby pointed her phone at the floor. Video of bodies on the ground projected on the back of the stage.
Sanders closed the performance in the same way she began it: “Love, splendid, deeply rooted and perfect … love heals.”
A joy-filled encore incited a rousing standing ovation, and the artists immediately sat down for a conversation with the audience.
A documentary about “Love Heals” is due on Netflix this year.
— Local arts critic Judith Smith-Meyer is a round-the-clock appreciator of the creative act.