NEW YORK, NY.- Wooden crosses, some drunkenly askew, dot a darkened stage at the start of Vuyani Dance Theatre’s “Cion: Requiem of Ravel’s Bolero.” There is silence, then the sound of weeping, which escalates to heart-rending, gasping sobs. A man, the source of the lamentation, appears and as he walks across the stage, his cries transmute into song, and the slow snare drum rat-a-tat-tat of Ravel’s composition begins.

Death, mourning, redemption, rebirth. These are the some of the subjects of “Cion,” choreographed by South African artist Gregory Maqoma, at the Joyce Theater. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say these are some of the physical and psychological states evoked by the nine superb dancers and four equally good musicians in this 2017 work, in which composer Nhlanhla Mahlangu seeds fragments of Ravel’s score into a rich brew of traditional sound.

“Cion,” another form of the word Zion, is named after a novel by South African writer Zakes Mda. Like an earlier Mda work, “Ways of Dying” (1995), it features a professional mourner, Toloki, who weeps in graveyards, lamenting the avoidable deaths of a community ravaged by violence and AIDS. In “Cion,” he migrates to Ohio, where he discovers the history and consequences of slavery.

Maqoma’s “Cion” isn’t a narrative retelling of these stories even as it evokes many of their themes and images. Instead the central figure (the masterful Otto Andile Nhlapo) is both an Everyman and an incarnation of human grief, surrounded by other mourners, sinners, saints and spirits.

The dancers are first revealed in a luminous glow (the beautiful lighting is by Mannie Manim) after Nhlapo’s opening lament, moving into quick sculptural shapes, falling back to the floor, rebounding to new configurations. The four singers dance too, as they deftly navigate various vocal styles, including the haunting a cappella sounds of Isicathamiya, developed by migrant Zulu communities and popularized in the West by Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

The piece offers a journey over time and place, as the dancers and musicians move through sections evoking illness and possession by the spirits, a ship’s passage, enslaved people threshing cotton, experiences of brutality and oppression, a tentative romance (the charismatic Roseline Wilkins shines here) and the fear of bearing children who will also be enslaved. But the journey is also ahistoric, circular, leading us back to the lamentations of the opening scene and its redemptive possibilities.

Maqoma and Mahlangu brilliantly build the intensity, echoed and strengthened by the steady crescendo of Ravel’s score, both instrumental and vocalized, and given a virtuosic beatbox counterpoint by Simphiwe Bonongo. The relentless repetition of the melody and the insistent beatbox rhythms steadily thicken the aural texture, invoking their own sense of ritual. Using three South African languages in impassioned speeches, songs and laments, the performers offer both enacted and abstracted images of collective prayer, grief, violence and tenderness.

Maqoma, who founded Vuyani in Johannesburg in 1999, deploys elements of traditional African dance and its urban incarnations here — crouched bodies and undulating torsos, the deeply bent knees and high-flung legs of the gumboot dances performed by miners. But “Cion” is notable for its seamless interweaving of these styles with contemporary and street dance techniques, including krump, breaking, tap and more than a hint of Michael Jackson’s signature moves. (White gloves feature, too.)

By the time the hourlong work reaches the final section, the suffering figures have been reborn as spirits, clad in androgynous, feathery black robes (by South African designer Jacques van der Watt), faceless under veiled, wide-brimmed hats, stamping and clustering, contracting and expanding, encircled by the crosses and graves, moved by the steady beat of the drum. Spirits or not, their movement and song are humanly moving, even exhilarating.

The cathartic uplift of this ending isn’t an upbeat smoothing over of the centurieslong pain of Black experience that Maqoma and Mahlangu depict, or of the social violence and iniquities that make us all, potentially, professional mourners. Death, suffering and grief feel very real in “Cion,” but the irrepressible vitality of the performers offers hope; an artistic prayer for collective betterment.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.