The people are on the run, crouching, protecting their heads with their hands. The people are fighting back, picking up and throwing objects. Some are struck down, but figures in white walk calmly among them: ancestors, spirits. The people are not alone.
This stage image is the message-delivering culmination of “Behind the South: Dances for Manuel,” which the Afro-Colombian company Sankofa Danzafro is performing at the Joyce Theater, in an engagement that opened on Tuesday. The Manuel of the title is the 20th-century Colombian anthropologist and writer Manuel Zapata Olivella, whose seminal novel “Changó, el Gran Putas” recounts 500 years of African diasporic history in the Americas.
The novel is an epic, but “Behind the South,” while inspired by the book, is largely a mix of ritual theater and semi-abstract dance sections. In one scene, Maryeris Mosquera Batista appears, visibly pregnant under her pure white dress. A fabric umbilical cord connects her to William Camilo Perlaza Micolta. With undulations and drum-accented contractions, she gives birth and removes the cord. He walks like a king, stately, with his pectoral muscles spasming impressively, until he breaks into ferociously twisting dance.
In another scene, Yndira Perea Cuesta spins, and the two layers of her white skirts billow and separate in rippling waves. This is appropriate for Yemaya, the Yoruban orisha, or spirit, of water and motherhood. Perea also wears long, blue-tinged braids, and when she spins, those spread and separate, too. The visual effect is striking.
Identifying Perea as Yemaya isn’t hard. But I had to ask company representatives to learn that Mosquera is playing the mother of the historical figure Benkos Biohó, a Mandinka who was enslaved in 1596, brought to what would become Colombia, and who successfully escaped to found a village of runaway slaves. Here and elsewhere, not all the content comes across, which makes some parts a little mystifying.
As for meaning through dance, a section called “Diaspora” has the strongest choreographic idea. A figure (the wonderfully composed María Elena Murillo Palacios) emerges in a mask of latticed ribbons, with more ribbons hanging down her front and back. Hips gently rocking side to side, she shifts from foot to foot with small steps on every beat, walking in place like someone doing the merengue. Other dancers join her, similarly masked (somewhat like mummies), and take up the same simple step, facing front with their arms held at their sides. Fixed in that position, they move — in lines and revolving formations, while Murillo (who represents Elegua, the orisha of roads) holds the center. Diaspora.
Otherwise, the message is in the motion, in its component parts and roots. Much of the movement vocabulary resembles that of West African and Afro-Cuban dance, powerfully synchronized with live drumming. As the dancers step and hop rhythmically, their shoulders rock steady or roll. In one bit, they seem to be running in place, the scale of each forward step exaggerated into a leap, when, mid-step, they catch the momentum and reverse it, swinging and kicking the leg backward. That catch is thrilling.
But the hourlong “Behind the South” doesn’t sustain this energy. The dancers, curiously, can look like professionals one moment, rhythmically precise and authoritative, and like talented amateurs the next, blurred and a bit awkward. It’s something of a surprise when, mainly in solo breaks, they flash into greatness. Otherwise, in earlier sections they seem to save gas for the final one, called “Epic,” which is kind of epic in how it goes on and on. Then the spirits and ancestors join the running and fighting people, who cannot see them. In this dance, the audience can.
Sankofa Danzafro
Though Sunday at the Joyce Theater, Manhattan; joyce.org.