WE FIND NO HARM IN DANCING.
Reggie Wilson brings his Fist & Heel Performance Group home to Brooklyn for a revelatory weekend of “moving into spirit.” In this kinesthetic, propulsive, rhythmic experience connecting American Black and Shaker traditions, Wilson explores the body as a radical tool for illuminating the internal and communal. Following his own visceral, obsessive curiosity, Wilson draws inspiration from Rebecca Cox Jackson, a free Black woman who became a Shaker eldress and formed her own community in Philadelphia—as well as the Shakers’ complex relationship to free and enslaved African-Americans. Through his framework of African formalism, applying postmodern, avant-garde movement with Black dance traditions, Wilson discovers what’s possible when ecstatic bliss meets structural rigor.
In POWER, developed at Jacob’s Pillow and the neighboring Hancock Shaker Village, Wilson imagines the mutual Black-Shaker influence as shaping experimental 19th-century American dance worship. Channeling the refusal of Anglo-Judeo-Christian limitations on the body, Fist & Heel makes that utopian energy manifest, whirling, stamping, and singing it alive. POWER coincides with BAM’s annual commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Reggie Wilson/Fist & Heel Performance Group is a Brooklyn-based dance company founded in 1989. Drawing from the cultures of Africans in the Americas, in combination with postmodern elements and his own personal movement style, Wilson refers to his work as “post-African/Neo-HooDoo Modern dances.” An inaugural Doris Duke Artist, Wilson is a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and has served as visiting faculty at universities including Yale, Princeton, and Wesleyan. He toured with Ohad Naharin before forming Fist & Heel and has lectured and has taught workshops and community projects throughout the US, Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean. Fist & Heel has performed at Dance Theater Workshop, New York Live Arts, BAM, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Festival Kaay Fecc in Senegal, among other venues.
“A simple gift indeed, this spare masterstroke …”
—The Boston Globe
Costume design by Naoka Nagata and Enver Chakartash
Lighting design by Jonathan Belcher
POWER was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and was co-commissioned by Jacob’s Pillow.
