Premiere New York Premiere
Production Language English
Country of Origin United States
Description 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.
Identifier 2022s.00113
