Erin Peters has been a dancer since she was 3.
Now 20, this Pratt undergrad on a pre-law civil engineering track danced competitively all through grade school. She’s versed in everything from hip-hop to ballet, but is most at home in modern dance and contortion. When Peters came to Duke from Columbia, South Carolina, she put competition on the shelf, yet she didn’t quit dancing altogether. So when Peters heard that Matthew Rushing, associate artistic director with the influential company bearing the name of dance pioneer Alvin Ailey, was holding a workshop on campus, she made time.
“When I introduce Alvin Ailey to anyone who's not in the dance world, I say he's one of the first well-known Black [movement] artists because of his show called ‘Revelations.’ It's a really big dance performance that goes through the history of African Americans in America. It goes through slavery, their religion, their relationship with God,” says Peters, who is also Black. “He was a trendsetter, a trailblazer.”
Ailey died in 1989, but the New York Ailey American Dance Theater continues the legacy of Black excellence through dance. And now Rushing, an Ailey member since he was a teenager in 1992, was at Duke for an artistic residency with the Divinity School. Peters cleared her day, attended the workshop, and realized it had also been an audition for a local performance with roots in “Revelations.”
On April 11, Peters was part of an ensemble drawing from both Duke and Durham’s art communities that danced a portion of “Sacred Places: Decoding the Spiritual” at the Durham Arts Council (another performance is planned for September). It was an interactive performance, an open dialogue with the audience about a show in progress, which helped ground this South Carolinian in her North Carolina surroundings.
“I wouldn't say my home's in Durham, but after this experience it felt like I got to know a lot more about where I'm actually at, not just that I'm a Duke student,” says Peters.
“Sacred Places” explores the sacred music of Black spirituals through dance. The original version of “Revelations,” Rushing explains, was more than an hour long and included a choir and live musicians. The spirituals that were cut from this version were later used for Rushing’s 2024 ballet “Sacred Songs.” “Sacred Places” is a new community-focused version of “Sacred Songs.”
As Rushing developed it, rehearsing with community members from Duke and Durham at the Rubenstein Arts Center, something clicked. He saw other dance groups from diverse traditions rehearsing nearby. Rather than being siloed in his own discipline, he was surrounded by other expressions in dance, in music, in visual art.
“Usually when you go into an area, artists are everywhere, but rarely are they thriving. Rarely are they supported enough to really have a strong voice,” Rushing says. “This environment feels very collaborative, supportive and generative.”
Divinity master’s student Henry Kennelly is relatively new to dance, but is no stranger to rhythm. He has drummed in every church he has been active in. “I even spiritually identify as a drummer,” Kennelly says. To him, the relationship between theology and dance is very clear.
“The most profound aspect of Christianity is that all of God, all of God's love and power, is born humbly in a human body, and lives forever in a human body,” Kennelly says. “That complete blessing of physical being is the biggest exclamation point of Christian faith.”
Rushing is a leader of dance ministry at his church in the Bronx. As his relationship with faith and dance deepens, he has started to treat dance as an opportunity to worship – any day, anywhere. Through movement, he posits, one can embody emotions that are tougher to articulate verbally. In the case of spirituals, these are recurring themes of hope, joy and lament. In choreographing “Sacred Places,” for instance, he shared a motion for lament with the dancers, who then used it to express that deep-set emotion.
“One of the things that enslaved people really understood as they created these spirituals was that even though the majority of their life was lived in sorrow, that sorrow, if processed correctly, led them to the joy that actually sustained them,” says Rushing. “One can't exist without the other.”
Dancing is spiritual for Peters, too. She has always been a praise dancer – and sometimes a choreographer – at her home church in Columbia. She attends a church in Durham, but it’s not the same as the community of her home congregation. And when Peters danced “Sacred Places,” she envisioned her ancestors dancing through her. She doesn’t know her lineage very far back, but she thinks her ancestors were probably in South Carolina. They may have known the horrors of enslavement. They may have lived these spirituals.
“We are keeping the past in mind while moving in the present,” Peters says.