“Obeah (A Black Ritual)” contemplates the residue of an untraceable work by a similar title, “A Black Ritual (Obeah),” conceived controversially in 1940 by Agnes De Mille. With a cast of fifteen black female dancers chosen through the directorship of dancer-theorist Katherine Dunham, De Mille debuted her evening-length work in the American Ballet Theatre season to a shocked and disgruntled audience; leaving a trail of little ephemera from the evening.

In this 2017 departure from the remnants of that prolific evening, Reid and Anakwe activate grief as a choreographic tool to recollect in the off-site location of wellness center, MINKA brooklyn. Questioning the infinite potential of “blackened” remembering as the propensity for creative fabulation for what has been erased, and that infinite potential’s correlation to the elusiveness of deep water, sound artist Rena Anakwe and performing artist Katrina Reid propose a collective descent into the undercurrents of memory with an insistence on superstition to congeal past-present-future. Choreographing sound, architecture, and the body, a twinned and poetic reflection emerges of the kinship between dj-dancer, sister-sister, mother-daughter; a wake emerges. The wake in this piece responds to Christina Sharpe and Dionne Brand, two thinkers working in the lineages of the Trans-Atlantic Diaspora, by taking up the folkloric symbolism of water as a material that both holds memory and proliferates futurity.

Moving the audience through the performance site throughout the work, there is an ushering by Reid and Anakwe towards a concluding collective fall: into grief as a source of generative contemplation, into the sensorium of the performative moment, into the beat or the groove, into deep celebration of what is unknown and forgotten.