GUILFORD — Join choreographer Reggie Wilson and two vocalists from his Fist and Heel Performance Group at a “Community Shout” for “(project) Moseses Project,” a dance performance work exploring representations of the Biblical figure Moses in story, myth, and history.
Wilson is the first artist-in-residence through the Vermont Performance Lab's new Hatchery Project, a multi-year collaborative residency partnership supporting dance and other performance artists.
Guests are invited to add their voices and bodies to this performance, which VPL Director Sara Coffey calls a “transformative sing-along” rooted in tales and songs from Africa, the Caribbean, and the American South.
The event is Saturday, March 16, at 7 p.m. at the Broad Brook Grange in Guilford.
Wilson is using his residency at VPL to develop a “sound montage” of tales and songs for “(project) Moseses Project,” which will have its world premiere this fall at the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival.
Wilson says his ensemble's work examines the migration of peoples and culture out of Africa and into the rest of the world, and considers “how we lead and why we follow.”
“I wonder about the methodologies of why we like to be led, why we sometimes want our leaders to be very strict, and at other limes loosey-goosey. I found it exciting that these issues are very contemporary but also quite ancient,” he says.
“Broadly speaking, '(project) Moseses Project,' is the story or myth (of Moses) seen through the black Afro-American community and the the black church, as well as the African cultures like Egypt and Nubia. There are a lot of ways of looking at this material. Different folks will come to the piece with different assumptions, and I desire to honor this diversity,” he adds.
Wilson will be joined at the Grange by vocalists Rhetta Aleong and Lawrence Harding, also of Fist and Heel.
Many Moseses
Careers are spent interpreting the figure and import of Moses of the Old Testament, from rebel to teacher to prophet to Great Emancipator.
Against this backdrop, Wilson says his project was inspired by his rereading of Zora Neale Hurston's 1939 novel, “Moses, Man of the Mountain,” which blends that story with black folklore and song for an effect the New York Times called, “A narrative of great power. Warm with friendly personality and pulsating with … profound eloquence and religious fervor.”
“Hurston was a big influence on me. She was an anthropologist, a scholar, and an artist at a time when few black women were any of these things.
“The story, rewritten in a black idiom, reads well and is very funny,” Wilson says.
In addition, Wilson was inspired by his travel to Israel, Egypt, Turkey and Mali. There, he discovered how different cultures interpret the story of Moses uniquely.
Wilson explains, “I discovered that there was not one Moses, but many Moseses, and the myth changed as each culture assimilated (him).
“For instance, I found it interesting how there are parts of the story we remember, and other parts that seem foreign to us, and how those parts differ among groups. The story involves deep cultural contextualization.”
And in some places, he says, there seems at first blush to be no context.
“One member of our group admitted that the only thing he ever knew about Moses was the (Val Kilmer-starring) animated motion picture from DreamWorks, “The Prince of Egypt” (1998) says Wilson. “But then I thought that was as valid a way into the story as any.”
This seemed especially true as the scholar with whom Wilson had his long discussions about Moses in Israel happened to be a consultant on the film.
Wilson notes that his project was widely embraced by many he spoke with from across the Jewish faith, though a few people questioned his assimilation of this revered figure.
“For a few, there is one right way to represent Moses, and our work is something of a challenge. This perhaps has made me a little nervous about what I am doing in this piece. I hope it is transparent that this work is about my relation to this material, and that I believe there is meaning in this material outside the religious Jewish context,” Wilson says.
Moses is the most important prophet in Judaism. He is also considered an important prophet in Christianity and Islam, as well as other faiths.
Wilson says he has taken scholarship into a studio to turn this story into what he calls a “postmodern-contemporary dance performance piece.” The important thing, he contends, “is what goes on right in front of me, and how I develop it choreographically, as I transform … scholarly material to movement.”
Ultimately, the performance will combine live music with pre-recorded songs: many field songs Wilson has collected in his travels from places as diverse as the American South and the Caribbean. He also will employ hymns from the black church as well as modern pop music.
Something to shout about
Wilson says he enjoys hosting Community Shouts. The Grange event will contain elements of a ring shout, or an ecstatic, transcendent religious ritual, as first practiced by African slaves on plantations in the American South, in which worshipers move in a circle while shuffling and stomping their feet and clapping their hands.
As Wilson explains, “The black church came out of this early musical ritual.”
“Moseses” has been a work in progress for more than two years. During this spring and summer as part of the Hatchery Project, Wilson will be engaged in a series of residencies to finish and refine the piece. At this week's VPL residency, he is limiting his focus to the piece's sound.
Visitors at the Grange event should expect part lecture and part demonstration, but no dance. “The only thing I will be doing as a choreographer (that night) is to try to control everything that happens, which I am afraid to admit is a weakness of us choreographers,” Wilson says with a smile.
From the Hatchery
According to VPL Director Sara Coffey, Wilson is the first artist-in-residence through VPL's new Hatchery Project, a multi-year collaborative residency partnership supporting dance and other performance artists.
“We're excited to link our work and our small rural communities with a national effort that will enable us to connect with such exemplary performing arts organizations and bring exceptional artists like Reggie Wilson and members of his Fist and Heel Performance Group to Vermont,” Coffey says.
With lead support by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and additional funding by the National Endowment For The Arts and the four partner organizations, The Hatchery Project will devote approximately $600,000 over the course of three years to specially designed multi-site creative residencies for four artists: Luciana Achugar, Beth Gill, Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar (Big Dance Theater) and Wilson.
VPL's three partner organizations are The Live Arts Brewery and Philadelphia Live Arts Festival in Philadelphia; Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography at Florida State University; and The Chocolate Factory in Long Island City, New York.
Each Hatchery artist will receive financial and administrative support to conduct residencies at the partner sites, which will tailor their residencies to the artists' practices and goals.
Fist and Heel
Wilson says he founded Fist and Heel in 1989 as a vehicle for choreographic development and for presenting his performance work. At VPL, he says he was given his first chance to look solely at the music outside of the “distraction” of dance, and to be able to record in a sound studio.
His company's name derives from a time when enslaved Africans in the Americas, denied their drums, reinvented their spiritual dance traditions as a soulful art form that white authorities dismissed as “fist and heel” worshipping, according to Coffey.
The group blends contemporary dance with African traditions from the rich spiritual traditions of the African Diaspora.
Wilson says he believes that much of what has come out of Africa continues to influence world events, and that this fact is being “erased” from public consciousness.
As Fist and Heel's artistic director, Wilson uses what he calls an intersection of cultural anthropology and movement practices to investigate what he describes as Africa's marginalization. Drawing on the ritual and body languages of the blues, and slave and spiritual cultures of Africa, Wilson employs postmodern choreographic structures to create multi-disciplinary performance works, or what he calls Post-African Neo Hoodoo Modern dance.
Wilson, described as a dance ethnography artist, has presented at such venues as Dance Theater Workshop in New York City, Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival in Massachusetts, and other prestigious international venues.
Wilson was the recipient of the Minnesota Dance Alliance's McKnight National Fellowship (2000-2001), a 2002 BESSIE, and a 2002 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2009 he was the Herb Alpert Award recipient in Dance, and also a Prudential USA Fellow. In 2012 he was named a member of the inaugural class of Doris Duke Artists, an initiative of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, which awards artists in contemporary dance, jazz, theater, and multidisciplinary work an unrestricted, multi-year cash grant of $225,000.