Before we begin tonight's program...

Reggie Wilson/Fist & Heel Performance Group
in Wilson's ...they stood shaking while others began to shout
Danspace Project in St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery
(photo: Ian Douglas)

Before we begin tonight’s program...

by Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Hello. My name is Eva Yaa Asantewaa (she/her/hers), and I am a non-disabled, medium-dark-skinned Black cis queer woman writer and editor and curator and counselor and mentor and atheist spiritualist mage of African-Caribbean immigrant heritage and of a certain age. I am certain that age, at this time of reckoning, is nearly 68--now just over fifteen days away. I have almost no hair, having clipped it off, nearly to the scalp, several times during this barber-less pandemic shelter-in-place, and I’m wearing a light layer of drugstore lotion and matte black eyeliner and mascara and a little bit of eyebrow pencil in a dark, greyish brown. I miss wearing dangly earrings and glossy red-brown lipstick; neither pair well with surgical masks. I am coming to you, remotely, from the light clutter of my snug and cave-like home office and also wearing an olive-green t-shirt with an image of Snoopy from Peanuts on it. The shirt is really old, a hand-me-down—maybe I should say “hand-me-over”—from my wife who had cut off the sleeves and neckband and overlapped and sewn the shoulders to make the armholes more fitted and the shirt a bit smaller across the chest, and her stitches are tiny and even. Hello. My name. Snoopy is seated in front of a bulky old computer monitor and surrounded by bits of text from the early days of the Internet (like "alt.schulz" and "FTP sites"), and the two of us--Snoopy and I--are greeting you from unceded and, in fact, stolen Lenni Lenape land just a stone’s throw away from St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery which, like a lot of things on stolen indigenous land, was built and maintained by the labor of African ancestors and where, during services held by the biblical god’s own goodly Christians, these ancestors were relegated to the balcony. I’ve sat up there. In the balcony. No, not back in the day. Though, maybe yes, if you believe in reincarnation. Which I actually think I don’t. But, no. More recently. I’ve watched Ni’Ja Whitson and their dancers from up there, through the posts of the balcony’s railing, as they performed Oba Qween Baba King Baba below for a preview audience of LGBTQIA+ folx like me. I looked down, watching a universe erupt across the warmth of a broad wooden floor. I’ve sat below and looked up, past the railing to watch Reggie Wilson’s troupe dance a passage of ...they stood shaking while others began to shout near stained-glass windows. Woman of African-Caribbean immigrant heritage. Hello. St. Mark’s Church. Among other things. Is a danspace. A constellation of spaces for the arts flickers around here in lower Mannahatta island, with star-spaces in any direction you look--walkable, if you are walking, flyable if you are a crow or a jay, though pigeons and mourning doves seem to rule the territory now. I miss the crows. I miss the jeering jays. I no longer see them or hear their corvid harshness near the trees of St. Mark’s. I am certain of my age and that, someday, I will miss the pigeons and the mourning doves, too. I am certain. This local, time-limited self I have been given pleases me. Like Audre Lorde, I treasure each identity even as I know I am a vast, capacious, timeless spiritual being having a human experience. The specificity of that human experience is the craft. That specificity is the key for the lock. The unique key for any lock, so many locks. What then, hello, if we all think of our bodies as conjurations of the Mighty Dead? So different, then...Hello. My name is...from that idea of reincarnation. Hello...I am...here, in this time, a unique key, turning in so many locks in this time of locks. Before we begin tonight’s program, I want to give an acknowledgement, acknowledging the jays I used to hear and their parental vigilance, and the red-tailed hawks who now hunt Tompkins Square Park and their august strength. I want to acknowledge the grief we humans cause and the grief we carry. I want to acknowledge that pain lives quietly, or not so quietly, inside nearly everything we make and do and, for some of us, it is the lightning bolt and jolt and juice carrying us through to the end of days. I want to acknowledge that breath is work. Hard and worthy work. At this time of reckoning.

(c)2020, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve, at Gibney, as Senior Director of Artist Development and Curation and Editorial Director. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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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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Danspace Project presents Reggie Wilson's Platform 2018

Left to right: Beth Gill, Jonathan Gonzalez, Miguel Gutierrez,
Angie Pittman and Edisa Weeks--artists who participated in
The Dossier Charrette in Reggie Wilson's platform at Danspace Project.
(Photo courtesy of Danspace Project)

Reggie Wilson’s Dancing Platform Praying Grounds: Blackness, Churches and Downtown Dance (Platform 2018 at Danspace Project) is laden. It is complex. It is stuffed with history and geography and architecture and cultures and ancestral energies and choreography and ideas and imagery and walking around neighborhoods and...stuff. As Black as one of my Bajan family’s festivities--the full range of meat and fowl, desserts and drinks, music and dancing and that one eccentric cousin holding court, as always.

How to take it in? How to make sense? How to interact and respond? Choose to sit on the outskirts and gaze from a critical distance? Or follow your curiosity, your empathy, your bravery, throwing yourself into the deep? Sink or swim, baby!

Maybe it’s wiser to break off a piece, here or there, to work with or be worked over by. You’ll have so many from which to choose.

During part of last Saturday’s Bell & Water: a symposium--for which I performed a brief spiritual ceremony to open the afternoon--Wilson and his Danspace Project associates offered a guide to “How to Navigate the Platforms.” This concluding panel presented an overview of Executive Director/Chief Curator Judy Hussie-Taylor’s groundbreaking curatorial initiative and a rundown of what to expect from Wilson’s current platform programming and its engaging catalogue. What it did not do--what perhaps could never be done--is extend a comforting, reassuring hand to anyone who might need to have things defined and neatly arranged for quick, easy consumption.

I’m thinking, this morning, about Wilson’s post-show conversations with his artists and how, each evening, he insists on passing around the dossier commissioned from historian Prithi Kanakamedala to inform and possibly inspire the platform’s artists and how that document--which I have never held in my own hands--somehow always fails to make it all the way from one end of the audience to the other. I don’t know why Wilson insists in having people try to hand it around in the allotted time. Maybe to demonstrate that it--written down and lasting, central and centering--really exists? That there is an intellectual blueprint, if you want to call it that? Is that really necessary? To glance at a page or two for a few moments--though, clearly, people have been taking longer--before passing it to the guy to your right?

I’ll take the radical view that Wilson--who has said, any number of times, that he’s resistant to the way our Westernized worship of the written word demotes other ways of knowing and communicating--might relax a little and consider stepping back from this practice as well as from the practice of post-show discussions entirely.

Stop right there. Don’t be horrified. And make no mistake: I love Wilson and am a huge fan of his from way back. This is not a criticism. But after seeing each of a couple of the performance events in this platform, I would have been immensely grateful for complete silence--and even private time for recovery--so strong was the impact. I also sensed some hesitation and reticence in some of the artists as they attempted to answer questions and in most of the audience folks as they were asked for questions. Maybe everyone needed time for more than a few breaths to re-group, re-ground and let the energies and ideas inside the works settle in. Settle in and continue the work that the best of dance can do.

Or maybe it’s just me. Maybe post-show talks are totally cool. But these seem forced. I don’t want to hear about and be directed by...so much...not just yet. But, you’ll say, you’re the woman who says she sat down and read the catalogue from cover to cover. Yes, in my own time, and in my own space, in privacy, so I could concentrate and take in and sift stuff. And the catalogue is a verbal as well as visual collage--mirroring what’s best about the platform format--and I could have read and gazed upon those pages in any order I desired. This time, I just chose to be all compulsively Virgo about it.

Go see the performances. There’s electricity and surprise and vivid performance--thinking now of dancemaker/performers like Jonathan Gonzalez, Angie Pittman, Ni’Ja Whitson and Same as Sister/Briana Brown-Tipley and Hilary Brown--and a real feeling of works with open, organic life which will continue to bring out new things to share and ponder. Works not only glancing at once at history and into the future but gazing from the vantage points of multiple temporal, cultural and personal dimensions. Just find a portal that looks interesting and jump right in.

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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Got GRIT? What's new and what's reworked at Gibney

Nigel Campbell (left) and Brandon Welch
perform in Joanna Kotze's world premiere, Already Ready.
(photo: Scott Shaw)

Invent, reinvent. Configure, reconfigure.

Since forming her Gibney Dance Company in 1991, Gina Gibney has continually re-imagined who and what it could be--from its demographics to the degree of its performers' engagement with the world outside of studios and theaters. And, this week, comes the second round of another programming structure out of the Gibney organization--GRIT (Gibney Repertory Initiative for Tomorrow) which, in effect, gives her five-member ensemble the challenge of working with choreographers other than herself.

The organization describes the program as follows:

Gibney Dance Company’s GRIT series “makes space for the future of dance” by commissioning new works and reimagining signature works by contemporary dance artists. GRIT posits the possibility that the present generation’s work will be recognized and celebrated in live performance by future audiences.

So, if I got this right, part of the mission of the troupe will be to embody and preserve works by other select dance makers. What GRIT mainly sounds like, though, is a way to expand on what Gibney dancers are exposed to and what they can be prepared to tackle in the future--an interesting development.

The opening last night at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center showed GRIT to be very much a work in progress. You wish well for these dancers but, with the distinct exception of Gibney stalwart and Associate Artistic Director Amy Miller, they have not yet opened into the depth of the work--in the case of Joanna Kotze's new Already Ready, potential depth; in the case of Reggie Wilson’s collaged config. Khoum-baye Heah, near-bottomless depths.

They risk looking far more callow and untried than they actually are. And even a secure veteran like Miller--whose every appearance is a master class in how to think about performance, how to perform and how to see performance--often seems to be just keeping up with the surface, basic requirements of the Wilson work.

Devin Oshiro, Brandon Welch, Amy Miller,
Nigel Campbell and Kasandra Cruz
in Reggie Wilson's config. Khoum-baye Heah

Wilson has made many dances for his exciting Fist and Heel Performance Group largely informed by his research into the arts and spiritual cultures and ritual practices of the broad African diaspora and infused with his wit and contemporary, formal inventiveness. (Long ago, he named this wondrous melange "post-African/Neo-HooDoo Modern dance.”)  It is to be hoped that Wilson's valuable repertory will indeed be available to future makers, scholars, performers and audiences.

Veteran FHPG dancer Paul Hamilton assisted Wilson in setting a medly of elements of PANG (2000), The DEW WET (1997) and Big Brick – A Man’s Piece (2002) on the Gibney troupe. By Hamilton's account, the experience was a generous one on both sides with the Gibney dancers bringing their strength of community, willing to embrace the Wilson aesthetic's formidable physical demands. Physically, those demands are ones of speed and a furious multiplicity of isolations, directions, levels, uses of weight and deployments of the pelvis. So much going on at once, often at full force. Their bodies hit it, but I don't see the whole of each person living it, being in it. I don't get why they're doing what they're doing.

Kotze's Already Ready, she tells us, comes out of desire to meet the demands of the current moment for stepping up--as citizens, as activists, as creative people who care. Are we ready? She believes we are, and that fits in with everything I've ever known about what Gina Gibney wants for her dance artists and for dancers in general. So, here, a good match--at least in terms of aspiration.

What I appreciate about Already Ready is that is does, indeed, seem to be about people ready to play. They bring their noisy feet into the space, and they boldly doodle and squiggle themselves all over it as if they were big, fat crayons. Diverse in racial background and motley in costuming, they're just a bunch of folks making their particular marks in time, bringing what they bring. I don't see a whole lot more going on here, but I do see that, if this is Kotze's ultimate point, it got across.

Performers: Nigel Campbell, Kasandra Cruz, Amy Miller, Devin Oshiro, Brandon Welch

GRIT continues through Saturday with performances tonight at 8pm and Saturday at 5pm and 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center

280 Broadway (enter at 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan

(map/directions)

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BAM Next Wave: Reggie Wilson's NY premiere of "CITIZEN"

Reggie Wilson/Fist & Heel Performance Group
performs Wilson's CITIZEN at BAM Harvey Theater.
(photo: Sally Cohn)

Early on in CITIZEN--new to New York from Reggie Wilson/Fist & Heel Performance Group for BAM Next Wave at BAM Harvey--a striking French Romantic portrait of Jean-Baptiste Belley momentarily appears on the backdrop behind one of Wilson's dancers. Belley, born in Senegal, was a slave, a rebel in Haiti's revolution and, during the French Revolution, was elected to the National Convention. If you knew none of those facts, you'd surely guess at the import of a Black man, in 18th Century dress, meriting such painstaking and forceful portraiture.

Belley's image remains visible for only a short time, long enough to impress but not long enough to get you thinking too much about his history. Wilson--ever the researcher and voyager--has taken care of all of that, including making the trip to Versailles to see the actual painting. He has also thought about race and what it means to find oneself in a society not perceived to be home. ("What does it mean to belong, and to not want to belong?") But he sets the viewer free to be with the work without necessarily having to puzzle out any of that.

While we cannot un-see Belley, and he might continue to haunt some of us, everything else we do see appears to atomize Wilson's research and musings. They spread out and form a texturous fabric of clear, repeated gestures and movement patterns sometimes assigned to specific performers and ultimately, beautifully, taken up by all. The work runs just a bit over an hour and, in that time, we're immersed in and transfixed by this living texture that signals individual portraiture without ever delivering big, obvious narrative details about characters, even in Altor Mendilibar's poetic cinematography. I got caught up in Anna Schön's sinuosity and toughness and wondered how Wilson picked that particular combination of traits to highlight in one body, but I would never expect to pinpoint their exact source or his reason.

It's as if Wilson beckons us close to a painting to look at the minute brush strokes and maybe even the chemical and molecular makeup of the paint because, after all, that's how the artist delivered the goods, how the artist told the story. That's how Wilson tells his story.

Along for Wilson's latest postmodern journey into the African diaspora are some adroit and interesting performers in addition to Schön--Yeman Brown, Raja Feather Kelly, Clement Mensah and Annie Wang.

Lighting: Christopher Kuhl
Costumes: Enver Chakartash

CITIZEN runs through Saturday with performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton Street, Brooklyn
(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)

MAP Fund announces latest grantees

dancer-choreographer Reggie Wilson

Reggie Wilson, Ralph Lemon, koosil-ja, Joanna Haigood, DD Dorvillier, Yasuko Yokoshi, Peggy Shaw, Sharon Bridgforth, and Anthony Braxton are among 41 artists working in performance disciplines who have just been awarded grants--ranging from $10,000 to $45,000--from Creative Capital's MAP Fund.

To learn more about the MAP Fund, click here.

To learn more about this year's grantees and their projects, click here.