Film Screening and Conversation with Reggie Wilson: Some Reflections on Prayerful Platforms

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DANSPACE PROJECT PRESENTS

Film Screening and Conversation with Reggie Wilson: Some Reflections on Prayerful Platforms

Saturday, April 26 | 6:30–8:30PM

Conversation
Reggie Wilson, Judy Hussie-Taylor, and Seta Morton

A NOTE ABOUT THIS PROGRAM

On the occasion of Danspace Project’s 50th Anniversary, it felt appropriate to revisit Reggie Wilson’s historic Platform which addressed the ground beneath our feet, the land and site where we still dance, gather, and pray. In 2016, I invited Reggie Wilson to be a guest curator resulting in his profound Platform 2018: Dancing Platform Praying Grounds: Blackness, Churches, and Downtown Dance. Wilson drew upon his three decades of research into African Diaspora religion, dance, and race to focus on the history of Danspace Project’s iconic site, St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery. Reggie curated 8 weeks of performances, discussions, presentations, and walking tours and he, along with myself, Lydia Bell, Kristin Juarez, and Prithi Kanakamedala (who compiled an in-depth dossier of the Church grounds) spent almost two years researching aspects of the history of the Church and the unlikely relationships between religious sites such as St Marks, Judson, Dia Center, and 92 St Y and experimental dance and performance. Through this research we unearthed the little-acknowledged fact that the completion of St. Mark’s Church was 1799, the same year of the New York State Gradual Emancipation Act. This is now incorporated into Danspace Project’s site acknowledgement. St. Mark’s unparalleled and complicated history is summarized in my introductory essay for Wilson’s Platform.

Inspired by Danspace’s Platform, Wilson was subsequently invited by Philadelphia Contemporary and Partners for Sacred Spaces to create a new version of the Danspace Platform. The Philadelphia project was initiated by the late Sam Miller who introduced Reggie to Harry Philbrick and which was made possible with generous support from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. Grounds that Shout! (and others merely shaking) became a series of performances curated by Wilson in May 2019 responding to the layered histories of Philadelphia’s religious spaces and race through contemporary dance.

We are pleased to host the New York City premiere of this singular documentary and are proud to have played a foundational role in making it possible.

Judy Hussie-Taylor
Executive Director & Chief Curator

Download a FREE PDF of the Platform 2018 Catalogue: Dancing Platform Praying Grounds: Blackness, Churches, and Downtown Dance

FILM CREDITS

Title: Grounds that Shout (And Others Merely Shaking)
Executive Producer: Center for Experimental Ethnography
Director and Producer: Gordon “Dee” Asaah
Curator: Reggie Wilson
Production Co-Producers: Kerry Bickford and Karen DiLossi

A NOTE FROM THE PRODUCER & PRODUCTION TEAM

What does it mean to bear witness to a process? To document not only the development of movement, but the relationships between performers and space, the city and its denizens? How does movement allow us to reconfigure our understandings of time, of spirit, and of the connections between us all? These are some of the questions shaping our relationship to “Grounds that Shout (And Others Merely Shaking).” The Center for Experimental Ethnography is a hub for faculty and students who have a creative practice at the root of their research process. We promote ethical, engaged, and experimental research, we engage with arts and community-based institutions throughout Philadelphia, and we forge connections with other like-minded institutions worldwide. We were thrilled to work with Partners for Sacred Places, Philadelphia Contemporary, and Reggie Wilson’s Fist and Heel Performance Group on this project, bringing the filmmaking skills of our graduate and undergraduate students into the moving cityscape of Philadelphia. Documenting a performance practice attempts to capture some of the affective resonance of what is, essentially, an ephemeral experience, one that circulates between and among performers and audience in the instance of its enactment. We hope to bring these dynamics to life, and to provide a means through which others can feel the magic of the grounds as they shout, and as they shake.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Reggie Wilson (Executive and Artistic Director, Choreographer) 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 including venues: 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 the US with Ohad Naharin Dance Company before forming his Fist & Heel Performance Group. 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. In 2019, he curated Grounds That Shout! (and others merely shaking), a series of performances in Philadelphia’s historic sacred spaces. POWER which premiered in 2019 continues to tour and inspire audiences.

Danspace Project pays respect to Lenape peoples. We acknowledge that this work is situated on the Lenape island of Manhattan (Mannahatta) in Lenapehoking, the Lenape homeland. We pay respect to Lenape land, water, and ancestors past, present and future.

SUPPORT FOR DANSPACE PROJECT’S 50TH ANNIVERSARY

Danspace Project gives a very special thanks to those who have supported our 50th anniversary and spring festival “Danspace @ 50: Work Is Never Done. Sanctuary Always Needed.” including the National Endowment for the Arts; the New York State Council on the Arts with support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature;the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs , in partnership with the City Council; Lambent Foundation; Howard Gilman Foundation; Jerome Foundation; and the Danspace Project Leadership Circle.

ABOUT DANSPACE PROJECT

Danspace Project presents new work in dance, supports a diverse range of choreographers in developing their work, encourages experimentation, and connects artists to audiences.

For 50 years, Danspace Project has supported a vital community of contemporary dance artists in an environment unlike any other in the United States. Located in the historic St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, Danspace shares its facility with the Church, The Poetry Project, and New York Theatre Ballet. Danspace Project’s Commissioning Initiative has commissioned nearly 600 new works since its inception in 1994.

More about our staff, our mission, and values

For information on our funders, visit danspaceproject.org/support

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