At Grace Church, Meagan Woods and Andrea McKenna Bare Their “Arboreal Soul”. by Tris McCall May 13, 2025

Meagan Woods sat upright on the floor of a church. Her arms went limp at her sides, her legs straightened, her unsmiling face tipped up a bit toward the arched ceiling, and her brown eyes became very wide. 

A few long, aching moments earlier, Woods had pulled a string that loosened a banner — a cloth arch in the rafters — from a rope overhead. Down came an image of a human being, spectral and partial, caught in some netherworld. There it hung like a portal in the forest, a little rupture in the evening, a glimpse into an in-between, inaccessible, but indisputably real. In Woods’s stare was recognition and astonishment, but no surprise. She’d danced around the tied-up banners for a long while. Now she’d let one loose, and she was staring at it straight on, held fast by the irreducible force of memory. Thus in the middle of an evening of movement theater, one of the most powerful moments came when the performer was absolutely still.

Grief, the grieving are often told, is like an ocean. It’s unfathomable, but somehow it still undulates. It’s full of crests and troughs, choppy waters, sudden storms, and moments of strange calm. When you’re in the middle of it, it seems to stretch on, forever, in all directions. It is probably no coincidence that dancer Meagan Woods moved so frequently with the quality of water at her solo performance at Grace Church Van Vorst (39 Erie St.), or that Andrea McKenna’s free-flowing painted canvases looked so much like sails. “Arboreal Soul (For You)” was a haunted hour indeed, but together, these two artists and collaborators were able to navigate through treacherous emotional territory that would have been unbearable to face alone.

Woods has danced to heartbreak before. In “Once She Dries,” a piece performed at SMUSH Gallery in 2023 [SMUSH was also co-producer of “Arboreal Soul”], she found a metaphor for impermanence in the endangerment of coral life cycles. Though her concern for the boiling and beleaguered sea came through, it was pretty clear that fractured interpersonal relationships were really what was on her mind. Similarly, “Arboreal Soul” adopts the visual language of trees. Woods stretched to the sky like a reed, and McKenna draped the edges of the performance area with verdant green sheets that evoked the shadowed feel of a forest glade. Nevertheless, when the dancer hit her stride, the figuration fell away. She was no tree. She was a human being carrying human loss.

And if you have any experience of grief yourself (and after the past decade, few do not), you’ll know exactly what pins her to the ground. You’ll know what causes her bouts of acceleration, her sudden giddy spins, and the frantic motion of her forearms as if she’s trying to shake something off. You’ll recognize the despair that constricts her body, and you’ll follow along as she glides, flat on her back, across a floor that seems to have been turned to ice. You’ll notice small expressions of the discomfort of healing, and you’ll discern where she’s carrying her trauma: in her shoulders, in the back of her neck, in the bones and sinews of her face. 

She’s also brought along a simple prop to help her focus her despair and to give her something to cling to. Though the brown shawl she wears is threadbare and unornamented, it quickly becomes the most important supporting character in the piece. Woods balls it up and shields it in her arms like an infant. She wraps it around her torso and spreads her elbows and makes it seem like a pair of ragged wings. She casts it aside dismissively, and just as quickly, she retrieves it. In one gorgeous and illusory sequence, she lets it encircle her feet, and twists her body by increments until she appears to be corkscrewing into the ground. The shawl works as a symbol of the burden she carries and the lengths she’ll go to in order to retrieve something of herself. Without giving too much away about the show (one I’m certain they’ll stage again), it becomes instrumental in her redemption. 

In McKenna, Woods has found an ideal collaborator — really the only local collaborator whose work fits the theme so seamlessly. The painter, who is also the curator at Art House Productions, has been casting her characters into the bardo for several years now. Her charcoal grey, rust red, and institutional green paintings of spectral figures in transition, simultaneously here and not here, radiant but retreating into the mist, fading as memories do. The spiritual power of her paintings was reinforced by the art and architecture of the setting: the arc of the burlap strips  suspended on ropes echoed the curve of the archways of Grace Church. The result was a true multimedia piece, and a successful alignment of dance, design, and devotion.

There was also music. Violinist Kourosh Ghamsari-Esfahani and pianist Casper Leerink also worked with Meagan Woods on the soundtrack to “Once She Dries,” and they’re back with a mournful score that suits the emotional tone of “Arboreal Soul.” The semi-ambient composition that accompanies the performance is immersive, it periodically coheres into hummable musical phrases — Woods hums along from time to time — and it does have a rhythmic pulse. It’s not hard to see how an imaginative dancer like Meagan Woods figured out how to move to it. I did find myself wishing, as I always do at Jersey City dance performances, for a genuine beat. Besides entertaining us, it would help viewers unfamiliar with dance organize what they’re seeing, and enliven a show that, at sixty minutes, was no brief encounter. It’s perfectly possible for a piece of music with a kick and a snare to be grave and even funereal. The pop-rock backbeat carries with it the life force and an intimation of the inexorable tick of the clock. Its roots are in the church and sacred music. Nothing speaks more articulately to the grieving. Our celebrated artists ought to take it more seriously than they do.