‘Dissectations’ Struts With Social Conscience : Stage: A mixture of rap and voguing moves from clubs to the theater at time of Kwanzaa, a week when African-Americans reflect, then look ahead.

Here’s a question for trend-mongers: What mixes modern dance, pose-based street dance, poetry, traditional Swahili chanting and rap?

The answer is freezoning, the African-American cousin of the much-hyped club fad known as voguing. But this is strutting with a social conscience: dancers rap about social issues as they leap, bop and pop their way through an eclectic movement vocabulary.

Now freezoning is crossing over from clubs to the stage in director Keith Antar Mason and poet Akilah Nayo Oliver’s “Dissectations: Anatomy of Rage” at Highways tonight through Saturday.

The occasion is Kwanzaa, a.k.a. the “Black Christmas,” a week-long African-American holiday that calls for women and men to reflect on the past and look ahead to the new year.

It’s the perfect opportunity, Mason and Oliver say, to face some tough issues, and freezoning is the language they’ve chosen to get the discussion going.

“AIDS, rape and incest--the three main issues in the piece--are very physical and they have to do with body politics,” Oliver explains.

“Freezoning is a way to use the body to express the rage, anger and pain you may feel about these issues and to move beyond it, to manipulate and transform your feelings with movement and sound.”

With choreographer-performer Ayo Sharpe, Mason and Oliver have created an multidisciplinary, episodic performance that includes poems, monologues, freezoning and chanting, as well as live music and an experimental jazz sound track.

“The link what connects it all,” Oliver says, “is the idea that the body is a sacred, personal entity. It--we--are being assaulted: as women, as human beings, as black people.”

That assault--or the fallout from it--is made physical in “Dissectations” through sound as well as movement. “Sound is a part of freezoning,” Oliver explains. “If you’re not using words, then you’re using guttural, emotional sounds like ‘mmmmmwahh.’ We do use words in the piece, but non-language sounds and movement are just as expressive.”

These sounds and movements emphasize Kwanzaa’s cleansing motif. “We’ve developed movements based on traditional African choreography, especially the rituals and ballets that express purging and freeing,” Oliver says.

They’ve also incorporated other elements of dance into the freezoning. “We’ve taken a step or a concept and adapted it to our own body needs, because none of us are dancers,” Oliver says. “So freezoning is also about adapting movements to your own rhythms.”

Rap also gets a new interpretation via freezoning. “Rap gets a bad rap because it’s supposedly advocating violence,” Mason says. “Well, here’s a way that we can use rap, where it speaks to people not just as a stereotypical, threatening black thing, but as something positive.”

“Rap comes out of the tradition of speaking poems,” Oliver adds. “We’re trying to elevate it, to bring in the idea of cleansing and dialogue in an atmosphere where people can move toward healing within themselves.”

That healing, Mason and Oliver say, is what “Dissectations” is all about. “We’re taking a great leap of faith and going beyond what’s being done (in most performance),” Mason says.

“We’ve deliberately altered the (Highways) space so the audience is central. When we work through the transformation from the pain part (of the performance) to the healing part, the ensemble has to go through the audience, carrying them along with us. The freezones are there for the audience to participate in as well.”

These unconventional tactics, say the collaborators, are meant to encourage people to start talking about issues that have been shrouded.

“There is denial about AIDS, but there’s also a lack of education in the African-American community,” Mason says. “But more black infants die of AIDS than any other minority.”

“Movement helps us remove that fear and tension so people will become involved. Maybe we don’t have the words now to express how we feel about these issues, but freezoning may give us the ability to move symbolically, to begin to get the words.”