Dance-theater piece re-creates ‘Seed’ of Black Lives Matter

It was wise of ODC Theater to schedule Embodiment Project’s “Seed Language” for the closing weekend of “Welcome Home @ 40,” the theater’s 40th anniversary celebration: This kind of potent, powerful, epic dance theater deserves the last word.

Co-produced by ODC, where Embodiment’s artistic director Nicole Klaymoon is in creative residence, “Seed Language” opened its three-performance run with a world premiere on Friday, Oct. 28.

Inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, “Seed Language” combines dramatic monologues with an alchemy of dance styles including hip-hop, waacking, locking and contemporary to revitalize issues that, in the words of BLM co-founder Alicia Garza, are at risk of “being reduced to a hashtag.”

The script comes straight from the mouths of social-justice activists and everyday Bay Area folk, from lightning rods like Garza and former Black Panther leader Ericka Huggins (both were in the opening-night audience) to 11-year-old Mariah Hardeman and an anonymous Haight Street police officer.

Several of the nine dancers double as actors, and very fine ones at that, voicing the real-life characters’ words down to each “um,” “like” and inflection. Tristan Cunningham opens the show as Garza, in a verbal barrage that can be distilled to the central message that “black lives have been murdered since we were brought here” as slaves.

In a monologue that quotes Joy Degruy, author of “Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome,” Sheila Russell describes the legacy of trauma that has rippled through a dozen generations of African Americans. But as Mika Lemoine says in the words of a white student-activist, whiteness offers an escape hatch from validating that perspective, unspoken permission to excuse oneself from the table of mutual understanding.

Lemoine then launches a waacking solo of profound beauty and emotion, eventually getting absorbed into a “Matrix”-inspired hip-hop ensemble performed to Daft Punk’s “Son of Flynn.” Throughout the work, actors repeat monologue phrases, like live samples, turning prose into a form of poetry.

The entire company is unified in its cause; nearly all of the nine racially diverse dancers are also active in community organizing, youth education or social justice. Each is also unique in physicality, technique and expression. Malcolm Jefferson has the freestyler’s kinetic hypermobility and projects a tender vulnerability; George “WuKong” Cheng is power and precision in B-boy moves. Amber Nicole Julian draws lyricism out of hip-hop, while Rama Mahesh Hall’s smallest movement is ripe with emotion. Dante “Animal” Rose and Jon Lee complete the first-rate cast, while Amara Tabor-Smith emerges in a vivid cameo not to be scooped here.

The vocal quartet MoonCandy, led by Valerie Troutt, performed Troutt’s original songs and move through the work like a Greek chorus. “Would you harbor a lesbian … Muslim … heretic … me?” they ask. “We got a right to stay alive,” they demand. The simple and superbly effective set decoration is little more than a black cube that serves as a dais, JennyB’s color-infused downlights and video by Carl Gresther and Joe Stillwater.

In lesser hands, this content could easily become tedious and pedantic. But Klaymoon, whose career is dedicated to promoting social justice through dance theater, paces the work beautifully over two hours (though intermission is a welcome breather). She finds touches of humor amid the struggle, and embeds the monologues in dance that is by turns abstract and representative.

This is an intense performance, a bit like taking a defibrillator jolt to the soul. There is a lot to grapple with, and the myriad perspectives that “Seed Language” brings into the forum allow no easy answers. We are asked to examine our own lives in response.

“Seed Language” also is exquisitely subtle in its way. When Jefferson lies prone, hands behind his back as though cuffed, he juxtaposes the police officer’s matter-of-fact description of reaching for her weapon. More dancers enter, and civilians and officers dance in an arc from uneasy harmony to opposition. Klaymoon has woven opposing perspectives together and left the threads tangled — as in art, so in life.

“Seed Language” continues 8 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 29, and 7 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 30. ODC Theater, 3153 17th St., S.F. $20-$30. www.odcdance.org www.embodimentproject.org