A man is beating a stick on a wooden box. Singers are taking short, shuffling steps to the rhythm.
This is the Santa Barbara Ring Shout Project.
Ring Shout is the oldest African-American performance tradition in North America, and was first practiced by slaves in the Southern states.
"It would help them to survive the cruelty and pain and frustration of being enslaved," explained the group’s co-creator and leader, Frances Moore.
"It's calling and responding and clapping and stomping and beating on a wooden box because drumming was not allowed," explained Moore. "So they just picked up a stick and a wooden floor and beat out the rhythm of Ring Shout."
Enslaved people wouldn’t have been allowed drums, so this was a way for them to make music and rhythms using their bodies. According to Moore, the call-and-response performance was a collective way to build resilience.
"They could not dance the original dance. They could not drum the original drumming. And they used a stick to keep the rhythm going and also as an outlet to deal with the hardship of slavery and to give them hope that one more day, one day, maybe tomorrow, we will be lifted out of the bondage of slavery."
Moore has revived the tradition as performance art in Santa Barbara. But today's America is very different from the one she grew up in, in Alabama, where she remembers experiencing discrimination.
"Segregated bus, segregated school...I just accepted it the way it was. I didn't know any difference because I was born into that situation. I just felt like something was wrong, and then through the years, I learned something was wrong, and now I know about it. I know we are all one flesh," she said.
She remembers the Civil Rights marches and reflects on what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. meant to her.
"What I remember most is this courageous, patient, caring person. His spirit is with me. His Spirit is carrying me. His spirit in carrying this society," said Moore.
Having seen all these changes in America, what does she feel about where we are now?
"I feel that it's a step backwards in some ways. But it gives everyone an opportunity to say, 'No, we don't want to step back. We're going forward.'"
For Juneteenth, the holiday commemorating the emancipation of enslaved people in 1865, the Ring Shout Project will perform in Santa Barbara at the Juneteenth celebration in Plaza del Park.
