ORANGE PARK – The human experience solicits grief, guilt, sorrow and hundreds of other inevitable instruments of despair stuck at the end of tip of a ballpoint pen. Praise dancing might just be grasping at trying to describe those feelings, but when the congregation really gets quiet, when the message really sinks in – they know the practice was it.

The memory of Destoni Higgins’ great-grandfather exists in her elementary school ball cap he always wore, but she also shows it through the nuances of her praise dancing at St. James AME church on Kingsley Avenue.

For Higgins, praise or liturgical dance allows her to describe the indescribable feeling of the death of her great-grandfather who was her surrogate father. It also allows her to describe the vastness of a God who cannot be chained “to a book or a bottle.”

“When her eyes are closed, when her eyes are closed and her chest is up and her eyes are closed her arms stretched back we can definitely feel her emotion,” said Alesia Scott-Warren, a dance instructor at the church. “We feel that she’s releasing something or waiting to receive something. She’s letting those blessings just flow.”

Higgins has danced since she was four years old. By six, she was already performing small solo roles through careful attention from her dance instructor in South Carolina.

She’s 17 now and, even with her high school graduation quickly approaching, she still finds time to come to the liturgical dance practices twice a month in preparation for the performances on the third Sunday of every month at St. James church.

“Having dance throughout my life is what brings me back to church, brings me back to life, brings me back to God,” Higgins said. “Without that, I wouldn’t be able to function. All that death for a 17-year-old is hard. Not a lot of kids go through the things me and my sister have gone through.”

Before uprooting her life in South Carolina to move to Florida, she had already witnessed the passing of relatives. Nonetheless, the passing of her great-grandfather – the man who always encouraged her to dance – catapulted her even further in her praise dance.

“We’re ministering through dance and reiterating what the word has been, what it means to us. It brings out the many components of the message,” Scott-Warren said.

Higgins is the lead dancer of about 12 other dancers in her group led by Angelic Herbert. The group she’s in now has only been around for two months and shares the stage with a separate liturgical group led by Scott-Warren. Collaboration between the two groups, she said, is an inevitability.

According to Scott-Warren, when Higgins performs she has the ability to make the audience feel her emotion through her facial expressions and the way she goes about her dance routine, “It’s passion,” she said. “She’s letting those blessings just flow. Blessings, spirit, the feeling of God, you can feel the presence just being in that space.”

The dancers often feel the emotion of the songs they dance to along with the congregation. The first song Higgins ever choreographed and performed herself was “Never Would Have Made It” by Marvin Sapp, a song that reiterates the necessity of God and solidarity between friends and family.

It was shortly after her great-grandfather’s passing, and there in her room, she broke down crying.

“I cried, cried through the whole thing,” Higgins said. “It was indescribable. I couldn’t describe the loss and pain I felt losing him. It was like me showing him that I missed him, I loved him, but I was still going to fight on and be the girl that he wanted me to be and going back and thanking God for keeping me here blessed me even more than I’ve ever been blessed before. Coming to St. James has been a great blessing to me.”

Since then, she has given all she has to infusing every dance with the emotion she attaches to it, whether through sign language or other physical representations of the lyrics.

The church’s pastor, Rev. Dr. Alesia Ford-Burse, has hosted praise dance teams for more than 10 years, longer than the church has been in its current location. Two years ago, the congregation moved from its previous location on McIntosh Avenue to 1324 Kingsley Ave.

Praise dance helps engage the youth at her church and is one of the few ways she can get the youth involved. She said dance builds self confidence in the children, who otherwise might sit in the back and disengage.

The St. James AME praise team performs June 12 at the church. Regular performances take place the third Sunday of every month. On those days, according to Scott-Warren, the congregation feels the spirit of God run through their bones.

“Sometimes it gets super quiet, which is the beauty of it, because it can bring out any emotion,” she said. “When she drops her hands back, sometimes we drop our hands back because we felt it. We’re right there with her.”