Out of the darkness text appears on a scrim. There is music, a loop with sounds played backwards. Then a figure appears in a shining suit standing down center, his back to the audience. His arms rise and his movements are small and sharp as the whispering squeals of guitar strings played close in on the fretboard. The movements and music are precisely synchronized and entirely unlike our standard NW fare. There will be no crawling backwards here.

There is a strong narrative arc in Gregory Maqoma’s Exit/Exist (at On The Boards through October 27). That narrative is not overtly conveyed, certainly not for those who do not understand its dominant verbal language. However, the changes from one emotional state to another, which are the salient part of plot, could not be more clear. As one member of the audience said, we understand the story in our bodies rather than our minds.

The story is that of the Jongum-sobomvu Maqoma, Gregory Maqoma’s early 19th-century ancestor, who played an important role in the middle years of South Africa’s century-long Xhosa wars. Through dance, music, costume, and projected verse, we see his story beginning with the loss of his home to British expansion. We see his rise to military and community leadership, the importance of cattle in the community, and his response to the British seizure of 23,000 cattle. This act united the Xhosa people behind Maqoma, who predicted that British bullets would turn to water against the Xhosa retaliation. This 1819 attack nearly succeeded and in its aftermath Maqoma surrendered himself to protect his people. The British imprisoned him on Robben Island, the same facility that held Nelson Mandela from 1962-1982. Later that year, Maqoma drowned attempting to escape the prison.

A scrim displays projections of the verse text, historic images and animations of a clock running backwards and forwards. It also provides a barrier between the musicians-as-chorus and the musicians as players in the story.

The music would be a reason to see this show in and of itself if it weren’t so perfectly integrated with and inseparable from the dance. The vocal group Complete performs the songs of Simphiwe Dana, working in concert with the musician and composer Giuliano Modarelli. Complete’s self-proclaimed “vocal indulgence of harmonies” could not be a more apt description. The public is invited to jam with these musicians at 10 p.m. Saturday following the performance—a free event.

Gregory Maqoma’s movement vocabulary is both embedded in African tradition and tied to the music and story. In the modern-day portions of the story, Gregory Maqoma moves with tense, delicate, isolated precision that suggests a shattering. When the dance moves to the early 19th century, the fingers lose focus to arms and legs: the man is more whole.

The end returns us to the present day. Having traveled through a vision of the past — and one that is not the dominant narrative in South Africa — we return to the shattered movements. Now they are only the extremities of that whole man.

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