Wilson's Fist & Heel troupe concludes Platform 2018

Choreographer Reggie Wilson
of Reggie Wilson/Fist & Heel Performance Group
(photo: Antoine Tempé)

My old friend Reggie Wilson put a "post-African/Neo-Hoodoo"* curse on me last night at Danspace Project.

Let me explain.

I'd been taking notes during his opening, hour-or-so Powerpoint talk--the initially-rambling preamble to his troupe's performance of …they stood shaking while others began to shout. Friday's talk, amusingly illustrated and delivered, touched on Wilson's perennial sore point--what he perceives as the chasm between the World of the Written Word and the Land of the Body Moving in Space and Time; the way colonized thinking devalues the power of bodies to communicate knowledge to other bodies. Only a man as accomplished and lovable as Wilson could get away with lecturing his audience on how to look at and analyze his (or anybody's) dances right before rolling out his newest one.

There was--for practical reasons as well, I think, symbolic ones--a break between talk and dance. During that brief turnover, I quickly and roughly jammed my notebook and a fairly new ballpoint pen into my crowded shoulderbag and turned to chat with friends and colleagues. When the houselights lowered for the dance, I reached to retrieve notebook and pen only to find the pen entirely dismantling in my hand, one small piece of plastic flying off onto the darkened floor.

I thought of many things at once:

God, I hope nobody's seeing this and laughing at me.

Oh, boy! Reggie and Tere O'Connor (who once admonished critics to stop writing notes and just look) would get a kick out of this!

I can only ever make out 5% of what I wrote in the dark anyway. So, fuck it.

Then, and only then, was I able to let go.

Reggie's curse.

His rich and complex platform--Dancing Platform Praying Grounds: Blackness, Churches and Downtown Dance--concludes, this weekend, with the beautiful Fist & Heel Performance Group ranging all over St. Mark's space including, quite vividly, the balcony to which enslaved African people were once relegated. His talk inspired a laser focus on that claiming of space and the variety of ways Wilson takes the measure of it, populates it, creates drama with it, brings warmth to it and affects those of us who watch.

If you get a chance to see …they stood shaking while others began to shout--inspired by rhythmic Black Shaker, Yoruba, Black Baptist and Spiritual Baptist worship traditions and a luscious collage of Black music--I think you will appreciate how all of this craft creates a sturdy container for deep, enormous feeling. (That feeling is the neo-hoodoo secret sauce, quietly simmering away underneath it all, unmistakably permitted and, to me, unmistakably Black.) I think you will find space for emerging feelings of your own, and I would imagine--I would hope--that you would not necessarily need to be Black to find and feel them. Certainly, Wilson's multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-generational dancers and vocalists--Hadar Ahuvia, Rhetta Aleong, Yeman Brown, Paul Hamilton, Lawrence Harding, Raja Feather Kelly, Clement Mensah, Gabriella Silva, Annie Wang and Michelle Yard--suggest this. Each performer brings palpable individuality--a generously-welcomed selfness--to Wilson's movements, arrangements and scenarios.

This seems a most significant retention from all of Wilson's many years traveling the African diaspora to witness how Black people evoke and fill ourselves with Spirit: the idea that one might come to that work through the door of one's own struggle and dignity and pleasure, in a way that has one's own signature, and that there is room for you just as you are. The strong traditions--of song, of movement--hold space for us to do what we need to do as we find family.

[*Wilson has long referred to his choreographic aesthetic as "post-African/ Neo-Hood Modern Dance."]

Tonight's 8pm show--already sold out--ends the Wilson platform. A wait list will be taken at the door beginning at 7:15pm. No late seating. For information, click here.

For full information on Dancing Platform Praying Grounds: Blackness, Churches and Downtown Dance, click here.

Danspace Project
St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery
131 East 10th Street (off Second Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Following Moses(es): Reggie Wilson at BAM

This morning, I continue to mull over why I felt, and still feel, somewhat cool towards Moses(es), a new work presented by Reggie Wilson/Fist & Heel Performance Group for Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival. I love it in pieces--and those pieces, I love to pieces. But...I still don't know....

Taking its premise from the biblical story of Moses, notions of leadership/followership and worldwide traditions of migration, Moses(es)--the plurality is important to Wilson, not just clever--incorporates building blocks and methods this dancemaker has employed before. Dry wit, personally researched and beloved vocal music of the African diaspora, choreography sourced in and flavored by cultural traditions but smartly abstracted and meticulously arranged in movements clean as a hound's tooth. His collaboration with lighting designer Jonathan Belcher locates his work in a place of theatrical glamour--never more so than in Moses(es)--and delight, as if spinning popular and folkloric culture into fine gold thread and opulent fabric for optimum display.

And there are Wilson's fellow dancers, a few whom have been along for his journey for more than two decades and turn their steadfast strengths to this piece; out of them all, none quite as eye-catching and heart-stopping in this particular work as the compact and scissory-sharp Anna Schön, a petite Orthodox Jew in a company mostly made up of tall Black men of American, Caribbean and African origins. Dressed in Naoko Nagata's red-themed costumes, Wilson's dancers pop from their empty environment on the Harvey Theater stage, creating pockets of movement and vitality. When I think of those pockets of vitality, though, I recall thinking that they looked like isolated lights clicking on in a stretch of darkness.

Watching Moses(es), I'm just realizing now, turned me into a follower, trailing behind, stumbling behind Wilson and the company as they--literally and figuratively--populated various locations onstage, offered and embodied various cultural reference points, moved to and sometimes sang various genres of music (spirituals, klezmer, house, what have you). At times, dancers would park themselves in a corner--lying on the floor or looking into the wings or just standing around--as action would break out in another location. Set against the rawness of the Harvey's stage which, for some reason, felt farther away from me than it usually does, Wilson's abstract choreography made the air seem completely still around not only any moving group but around each individual mover. The stage picture looked static and chilled, particularly any time that regulated or repeated or ritualistic action was involved or the ensemble evenly distributed its members in the manner of the white polka-dots that decorated some costumes.

Singing and chanting--some live, some on recording--and rhythmic clapping and stamping accompany much of the dancing. Some vocals emerge, subtly, from the dancers, or from Wilson and one or another performer almost entirely tucked out of sight in a corner of the space. Our ears are pulled to follow all of that, too.

I'd catch a glimpse of the very end of Wilson's tapping foot, and I'd want to go down there, round any obstruction, to be able to simply watch him. That strong sense of distance and separation and longing--maybe intentional--formed such a large part of my experience of this piece that, at the end, I felt I never got a chance to wrap my arms around it as a whole.

Did I say how it all starts? Wilson, dressed in a white jumpsuit, comes out on stage and just stands gazing out at us for a while longer than seems normal and comfortable. Then suddenly, and dryly, he identifies the troupe: "Reggie Wilson/Fist & Heel Performance Group." Then the other performers come out, one by one, telling us their names, their places of origin and how long they've been with the company, all of which charms the audience no end. Then they retreat to a corner, turning their backs on us and gazing at something we'll never see, as Louis Armstrong swings "Go Down, Moses." Instead, we watch Wilson, in the middle of the stage, working hard to stuff a large piece of red, soft-sided luggage with what looks like half-a-stage's worth of Mylar tinsel. He pushes and prods and pushes and prods the billowing tinsel. Will he eventually get it all in? What do you think? Now that was one sequence I felt my arms wrap around.

I think back on the silver glitter of that mound of tinsel and the nearly unreasonable dazzle of Belcher's lighting throughout, especially in the house music sequence. Impractical and fabulous, all of it, stuffed in a totally mundane piece of luggage, the way fabulosity can inhabit and animate our mundane physical selves. And necessary for all of its fabulous impracticality. It's a must. Wilson has spent most of his life in art--unreasonably impractical, that--and traveling, traveling, traveling to feed that art with all the unreasonably fabulous gifts of the turning world.

Moses(es) continues through Saturday evening with performances at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton Street, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

Fists, heels and songs

Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group performed TheRevisitation last week at New York Live Arts. To read my Dance Magazine review, click here.

Joyce Foundation award goes to Reggie Wilson

Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago, Reggie Wilson receive Joyce Foundation Award
by Zachary Whittenburg, Time Out Chicago, January 24, 2012

Anna Schon: Spirit in the dance

Why I Dance

by Anna Schon, Dance Magazine, February 5, 2011

Wilson & Ouamba at BAM

Here's the link to my Dance Magazine review of The Good Dance by Reggie Wilson and Andréya Ouamba last month at BAM.

An Alpert Award for Reggie Wilson

Hearty congratulations to dancer-choreographer Reggie Wilson, winner of the 2009 Alpert Award in Dance. Wilson, and frequent collaborator Andréya Ouamba of Senegal will present the premiere of The Good Dance -- Dakar/Brooklyn during this year's BAM Next Wave Festival.

2009 Alpert Award in the Arts

Out of Site on Bowling Green

Accounting for Customs--a new site-specific ensemble work by choreographers Andréya Ouamba (a Congolese performer from Senegal) and Reggie Wilson (U.S.)--utilizes the main entrance steps of the former Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House at 1 Bowling Green at the tip of Broadway. Some months ago, during an interview for Dance Magazine, Wilson told me of his fascination with the history of this building, designed by Cass Gilbert, that now houses a federal bankruptcy court and the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. He spoke of the slave trade--foundation of the rapid economic development of colonial states--and of his eagerness to dig into the story of the Custom House's connection to slavery.

The collaboration, including several dancers from Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group as well as six guest dancers, is a project of Sitelines, curated and produced by Nolini Barretto and presented by Lower Manhattan Cultural Council as part of the annual River to River Festival.

Publicity for Accounting for Customs alluded to "questions of memory and loss and how people innovate within and against traditions...questions of preservation, continuity, memory and loss...stolen pasts and troubled and hopeful presents..." All of this led New York Times senior dance critic Alastair Macaulay to remark, "Such words...belong on grant applications."

Indeed, some dance publicity, rather than offering an accurate preview of what will be shown, seems tailored to appeal to funders' sensibilities. I suspect that Ouamba and Wilson have sincere, genuine objectives in mind. But the resulting 15-minute work led Macaulay to dwell on allusions to Florenz Ziegfeld and Busby Berkeley and to write, "It would be a pity to watch this work more for socio-historic meaning than for sheer sensuous pleasure." (To read Macaulay's review, click here.)

What's a pity is that the original vision quest has not produced a work that more forthrightly asks more of us than appreciation of its "sensuous pleasure" and its craft. Or perhaps the pity is when powerful critics are reluctant to look beyond the surface reticence of certain dances to their more eloquent sociopolitical undercurrents. Or perhaps the pity is about how much depth of investigation can you realistically accomplish in fifteen minutes, or outdoors, downtown, at lunchtime. Whatever the pity is, I hope that these choreographers will have an opportunity to revisit their original themes, perhaps when the apparent aesthetic distraction of 1 Bowling Green and its staircase is no longer a factor.

In the meantime, I believe I saw in Accounting for Customs some signs of love and community (dancers embracing), resistance (rolling up the steps against gravity), crowding in the slave ships (bodies piled up), slave auctions (extension and display of limbs), as well as timeless images of hard labor, abduction and independent will and action.

Remaining performances of Accounting for Customs are scheduled for today and tomorrow at 12:30pm and 1:30pm. For further information, click here.

Here's a 1994 video clip of In-between Baobabs by and featuring Andréya Ouamba and Esther Baker.

clipped from www.youtube.com