praise break

In the lead up to making our most ambitious production yet - a 2024 remount of mouth//full, realized at scale inside San Francisco’s historic Grace Cathedral - OYSTERKNIFE created a series of short performances and works-in-progress to research the text, song, choreography, ritual and audience participation elements that informed our final production. praise break was one of those exploratory performances, presented at Dance Mission Theater’s Dance In Revolting Times (D.I.R.T.) Festival in April 2023. This performance subverted the function of the preacher’s sermon, performed by Chibueze with their own original text, and the praise break: spiritually-informed dance incited by ecstatic encounters with god, which was performed by Gabriele. Embodying the stylized gestures and language of a Christian preacher, Chibueze gave a sermon connecting indigenous Igbo concepts of god with a queer interpretation of the first commandment in the Bible - a transgressive reading originally proposed by renowned Black gay poet and reverend, Marvin K. White. Using the sermon as a performance lecture, Chibueze urged audiences to seek god within themselves, rather than external forces, while naming slippages in Biblical language that allowed alternate understandings of god. The performance included a choreographed dance co-created and performed by OYSTERKNIFE, set to Louis Armstrong’s 1962 song “They Say I Look Like God.” It concluded with a closing ritual led by Chibueze, inviting Black audience members onstage to carry palm leaves: objects which echoed indigenous West African landscapes, Igbo spiritual symbolism, and Jesus Christ’s Palm Sunday procession in the Bible.