Choreographed to spirituals, gospel, and blues, the dance tells the story of the anguish of slavery and the joy in baptism and Christian rebirth, a uniquely American story with its universal appeal.

Because it's universal that we have been through trials and tribulations and that we've suffered, and you name somebody who hasn't.

But let us say that when you hear the first strains of, I've been buged and I've been scorned, but you can see the yearning in the dancers' faces and in their outstretched hands, looking heavenward, looking earthward, looking heavenward, that already says something with the minimal amount of movement.

If you got through the sadness of fix me Jesus and didn't my Lord deliver Daniel and waiting in the water and sinner man and I want to be ready and you get to rock my soul in the bosom of Abraham.

There are people that just want to pick up tambourines and understand that.

That is flourishing.

When you go on the entire journey through the sadness, through everything that life offers in this one half hour classic work, and it finishes with joy.

Dance is the story of human history, offering audiences and dancers communion with generations past and present, with ancestral memory that exists at the cellular level.