REGGIE WILSON/ FIST & HEEL PERFORMANCE GROUP

The Company

Reggie Wilson/Fist & Heel Performance Group is a Brooklyn-based dance company that investigates the intersections of cultural anthropology and movement practices and believes in the potential of the body as a valid means for knowing. Our performance work is a continued manifestation of the rhythm languages of the body provoked by the spiritual and the mundane traditions of Africa and its Diaspora, including the Blues, Slave and Gospel idioms. The group has received support from major foundations and corporations and has performed at notable venues in the United States and abroad.

“Fist and heel is clapping and stomping, shouting and hollerin’ – and the manipulation of energies.”

–Reggie Wilson

Denied their drums, enslaved Africans in the Americas reinvented their spiritual dance traditions as a soulful art form that white and black authorities dismissed as merely ‘fist and heel worshipping’.

fistandheelperformancegroup.org

PRESS KIT

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The Director

REGGIE WILSON (ARTISTIC DIRECTOR, CHOREOGRAPHER AND PERFORMER) founded Fist & Heel Performance Group, in 1989. Wilson draws from the cultures of Africans in the Americas and combines them with post-modern elements and his own personal movement style to create what he often calls “post-African/Neo-HooDoo Modern dances.” 

His work has been presented and workshops taught nationally and internationally at many venues. This list is a sample and by no means exhaustive: Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York Live Arts, Summerstage (NY), Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Summer Stages Dance @ ICA Boston (MA), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, UCLA Live, Redcat (CA), VSA NM (New Mexico), Myrna Loy (Helena, MT), The Flynn (Burlington, VT), Contemporary Arts Center (New Orleans), Dance Umbrella (Austin, TX), Linkfest, Festival e’Nkundleni (Zimbabwe), Dance Factory (South Africa), Danças na Cidade (Portugal), Festival Kaay Fecc (Senegal), The Politics of Ecstasy, and Tanzkongress 2013 (Germany).

Wilson is a graduate of New York University, Tisch School of the Arts (1988, Larry Rhodes, Chair). He has studied composition and been mentored by Phyllis Lamhut; Performed and toured with Ohad Naharin before forming Fist and Heel. He has lectured, taught and conducted workshops and community projects throughout the US, Africa, Europe and the Caribbean. He has traveled extensively: to the Mississippi Delta to research secular and religious aspects of life there; to Trinidad and Tobago to research the Spiritual Baptists and the Shangoists; and also, to Southern, Central, West and East Africa to work with dance/performance groups as well as diverse religious communities. He has served as visiting faculty at several universities including Yale, Princeton and Wesleyan. Mr. Wilson is the recipient of the Minnesota Dance Alliance’s McKnight National Fellowship (2000-2001).  Wilson is also a 2002 BESSIE-New York Dance and Performance Award recipient for his work The Tie-tongued Goat and the Lightning Bug Who Tried to Put Her Foot Down and a 2002 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow. He has been an artist advisor for the National Dance Project and Board Member of Dance Theater Workshop.  In recognition of his creative contributions to the field, Mr. Wilson was named a 2009 United States Artists Prudential Fellow and is a 2009 recipient of the Herb Alpert Award in Dance. His evening-length work The Good Dance–dakar/brooklyn had its World premiere at the Walker Art Center and NY premiere on the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 2009 Next Wave Festival. In 2012, New York Live Arts presented a concert of selected Wilson works, theRevisitation, to critical acclaim and the same year he was named a Wesleyan University’s Creative Campus Fellow, received an inaugural Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, and received the 2012 Joyce Foundation Award for his successful work Moses(es) which premiered in 2013. His critically acclaimed work CITIZEN, premiered 2016 (FringeArts – World; BAM Next Wave 2016 – NYC); both these works continue to tour. Wilson was curator of Danspace Project’s Dancing Platform Praying Grounds: Blackness, Churches, and Downtown Dance (Platform 2018) and created the commissioned work “…they stood shaking while others began to shout” specifically for the space at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery. Most recently, he curated Grounds That Shout! (and others merely shaking), a series of performances in Philadelphia’s historic sacred spaces. His newest work is titled POWER.

POWER – Trailer

POWER – Excerpt from a work in progress

CITIZEN Promotional Sizzle

Moses(es) Promotional Sizzle


Repertory

POWER – NDP TOURING SUPPORT AVAILABLE – POWER is Wilson’s new evening-length dance performance work. It reimagines compelling core Shaker values, contributions, practices and histories through a postmodern American lens. This work builds and expands on his investigations related to the early evolution of African American spiritual worship. Points-of-inspiration for this work include Black Shaker Eldress Mother Rebecca Cox Jackson, Shaker foundress Mother Ann Lee, The First Great Awakening and American Utopianism, Binary Opposition, and foundational research from his work The Littlest Baptist. This evening-length work is created with 8 dancers, 3 vocalists, lighting designer Jonathan Belcher and 2 costume designers (Naoko Nagata, Enver Charkatash).

Some of Wilson’s key motivating questions: What would the worship of Black Shakers actually have looked like? How were the general, core Shaker tenets of “heaven on earth” realized (social activism, pacifism, gender equality, celibacy and the confession of sin)? What are our misunderstandings about Shakers? These questions center and obsess around the black leader Eldress Mother Rebecca Cox Jackson as well as Shaker foundress, Mother Ann Lee. Both women, leading followers in 17th Century America where one wouldn’t assume there were women in such key positions, even less, black Shakers. Limited documentation exists on specific black Shaker practices (pre-Civil War and Industrial Revolution America) but Wilson’s research seems to indicate correlations of Africanist retentions with Shaker beliefs and practices. These might include beliefs in a dual-Godhead, formations/patterns in worship, Shout retentions, fractal movement patterns, progressive thought and hard work, innovations, and advancements in technology as acts of worship.

The premiere of POWER took place at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival and coincided with Fist and Heel’s 30th Anniversary (founded 1989).

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CITIZEN – ‘What does it mean to belong’ and ‘What does it mean to NOT want to belong’, are core questions of Reggie Wilson’s investigations for his new evening length dance work, CITIZEN. In CITIZEN, Wilson drills down into the human desire to belong with exponentially expanding questions. ‘Do the injustices in today’s America engender a feeling of belonging? What supports belonging? Is belonging solely something internal, inside the individual? Is a sense of belonging or not belonging, a private or a public matter? How is my experience as a Black, 48-year old male in America compared to a black 30-year old male or a 23-year old black male’s experience , reality of America, different? What makes our experiences different, race, class, religion, gender, location, ancestry, language…? Do I change to belong? What do I change? Is change necessary? Does knowing the past help now, how? Do I become an anonymous individual if I belong? Belong to what… Where? Why? How? Who?’ This work takes these ever-expanding questions out of the theoretical and cerebral, and confronts them on kinesthetic, personal, individual, and macro levels, to offer alternatives. CITIZEN promises to engage and compel while igniting disruptive, uncomfortable perspectives on our compassion and humanity.

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MOSES(ES) is Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel’s rich evening-length work– choreographed for nine, set to live and Diasporic-influenced, layered vocalizations– that asks: how do we lead and why do we follow. This work’s filtered through the multiple iterations of Moses represented in religious texts + in mythical, canonical + ethnographic imaginations.

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Community Engagement and Residencies

COMMUNITY SHOUTS stimulating, transformative sing-a-longs where participants restore and connect to their rhythmic voices and bodies. The Shouts unearth some of the origins, functions and interconnections through tales and songs from Africa and the African Diaspora (the Caribbean and American south).

CREATIVE HEALING WORKSHOPS company members guide and participate in creative writing, and/or movement workshops for young people and seniors.

OPEN REHEARSALS AND POST-PERFORMANCE DISCUSSION audience, performers and choreographer make contact on a more intimate level, either in the studio or post-performance, during which time audience members and performers have an opportunity to exchange perspectives and further understand Wilson’s process and presentation.

MASTER CLASSES AND WORKSHOPS choreographer Reggie Wilson teaches Master Classes in his particular movement idiom, merging contemporary Technique and post-modern structures with rhythmic folk traditions. Wilson also conducts workshop intensives in Dance Composition.

LECTURES Wilson delivers engaging and informative lectures on his career arc, research (kinesthetic and academic), and on various cultures and communities of the African Diaspora.

LECTURE/DEMONSTRATIONS consists of various themes related and relevant to the presented performance.


TOUR DATES

  • Fri
    16
    Feb
    2024
    Sat
    17
    Feb
    2024

    Hancher Auditorium

    Iowa City, Iowa

    POWER


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