Hands Singing Song focuses on the multiple significations enacted by the hands and how the symbolic valences attached to hand gestures evoke different time periods and aspects of black life in America. As the piece develops through six sections, the audience sees a complex experiential mosaic, and what amazes is the choreographic finesse by which the motif of hands and their movement evokes landscapes of times and spaces, the vicissitudes of black history. Like a metonym, the motif signals the complexity of past, present, and future.
The topics range from paying homage to past revolutionaries in black culture, to affirming identity and solidarity in the black liberation movement, to honoring the nurturing and love in black womanhood, to acknowledging the deep spirituality of the black church, to resisting oppression. The piece ends with hope and affirmation: even if it seems that there is not the vibrant sense of revolution in black America today that there was in liberation movements of years past, activism is not dead in the community. There are many people working tirelessly for justice. By invoking contemporary revolutionaries, the ending recalls the piece's beginning. It marks the continuity of the lineage of hands that signal resistance and stand as a symbol of positive energies and meaning-making.