CITIZEN - KRAVIS CENTER
Choreographer Reggie Wilson’s compelling new work, Citizen, investigates what it means to belong and not belong, probing the nuanced layers that lie beneath public versus private. His Brooklyn-based performance group boldly blends contemporary dance and African traditions, drawing from the movements of blues, slave and gospel cultures to create provocative works that both honor the past and break new ground.
CITIZEN Performance- Tigertail (Miami, FL)
Noted NYC-based choreographer Reggie Wilson brings his dance company, Fist and Heel Performance Group, to Miami-Dade County Auditorium On.Stage Black Box to perform CITIZEN. In this work, Wilson asks, "What does it mean to belong?" and "What does it mean to NOT want to belong?", core questions of Reggie's investigations for this new evening-length dance work. 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?" CITIZEN promises to engage and compel while igniting perspectives on our compassion and humanity.
DanceMotion USA
This visionary, multidisciplinary performance group reinterprets and reworks rhythm and movement traditions of Africa and its diaspora with communities in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Panama.
CITIZEN Overture Center (Madison, Wisconsin)
The Brooklyn-based dance company draws from the spiritual and mundane traditions of Africa and its diaspora, and takes its name from the distinctive worship practices of enslaved Africans in the Americas. Choreographer and artistic director Reggie Wilson creates work that displays rigor, structure and craft in a postmodern dance vernacular. His choreography goes way beyond what’s often called “black dance” and ranges from strict dance pieces to full, all-inclusive multimedia performance art pieces
CITIZEN BAM Next Wave Festival (BK, NY)
Choreographer Reggie Wilson’s (Moses(es), 2013 Next Wave; The Good Dance - dakar/brooklyn, 2009 Next Wave) deeply expressive postmodern work draws from the languages of the African diaspora, weaving elements of blues, slave, and spiritual cultures into contemporary and pedestrian movement vocabularies. Returning to BAM with Fist & Heel Performance Group, Wilson—who tours to the Dominican Republic, Panama, and Haiti next year as part of DanceMotion USASM, an exchange initiative led by the US Department of State and produced by BAM—presents a brand new work inspired by African-American figures throughout history who were conflicted and chose not to leave their home country in spite of pervasive racism. Five dancers engage with video projections in a series of provocative solos that overlap and intersect, asking: What does it mean to belong, and to not want to belong?
MOSES(ES) WhiteBird Performance (Portland, OR)
Reggie Wilson, award-winning choreographer and performer, draws from the cultures of Africans in the Americas and combines them with post-modern elements and his own movement style to create what he calls “post-African/Neo-Hoodoo Modern Dances.” His critically acclaimed and magnificently uplifting Moses(es) celebrates, through dance, song and vocalization, the migration of peoples and culture from Africa out into the world.
Knowing Arts More
Presented by the School of Dance, "Knowing Dance More" is a series of lectures, conversations and informal showings led by important artists and scholars in the international field of dance. This series seeks to bring into focus current issues within the production, performance and practice of dance works and will hopefully foster ongoing conversations about knowing dance (more).
Choreographer and performer Reggie Wilson, executive and artistic director of First and Heel Performance Group, will present "The Ring Shout - An African Technology in Relationship to Post-Modern Dance," a source of inspiration, research, history and information.
CITIZEN - WORLD PREMIERE
What does it mean to belong? What does it mean to NOT want to belong?
This greatly expressive, physically virtuosic company takes audiences on an exploration of the core human impulse to belong, and the ways that a society treats race, culture, and income to influence one’s identity in a group. CITIZEN is a contemporary dance that confronts the complex challenges, struggles, judgments, and webbing between anonymity and community, between ideas of individual self and of being a citizen of your homeland or your adopted homeland. This exhilarating and provocative work features layered interplay between dancers, film, and shadow—and a masterful display of motion.
Yard Offshore Creation Residency Martha’s Vineyard (MA)
The Yard supports artists in both their creative processes and social instrumentality through paid research residency, public performance, and long- term educational and community engagement across all ages and diverse cultural populations of Martha’s Vineyard, and in broad application to New England and the nation.
Replacing PhiladelphiaPainted Bride Arts Center (PA)
Re-PLACE-ing Philadelphia, the Painted Bride’s project focusing on building an expanded archive of cultural memory that includes multiple histories, re-place-ing the established with new narratives and understandings of Philadelphia. Reggie Wilson explores how we “physicalize place” in this postmodern work featuring Kristel Baldoz, David Brick, Paul Hamilton, Germaine Ingram, Jumatatu Poe, Maria Urrutia, and Miles Yeung-Tieu. Reggie and the artists create space and opportunity to reveal the physical testimonies and histories in their bodies. The results are poetic, intentional, and dynamic all at once.
BAC Tech Residency (New York, NY)
Choreographer/performer Reggie Wilson (NYC) will confront questions about the human desire for belonging in CITIZEN, a new work aimed to ignite disruptive, uncomfortable perspectives on compassion and humanity.
Replacing Philadelphia (PA)
Re-PLACE-ing Philadelphia has engaged three Artists/Thinkers: Reggie Wilson, Faustin Linyekula, and Marty Pottenger, who are creating new works with people in Philadelphia, catalyzing the question: What shapes this city's history? A series of performances, exhibitions, and events will be staged at the Bride and throughout the city in April 2016.
Replacing Philadelphia (PA)
A project of the Painted Bride Art Center, Re-PLACE-ing Philadelphia is building an expanded archive of cultural memory that includes multiple histories, re-place-ing the established with new narratives and understandings.
American Dance Platform The Joyce Theater (New York City, NY)
The Joyce Theater is proud to launch its first American Dance Platform, showcasing some of the most captivating American companies performing today. This year’s festival features companies representing different regions throughout America and pairs emerging companies with those that are more established. The festival is curated by Paul King and Walter Jaffe, the founders and directors of White Bird, the acclaimed dance presentation series based in Portland, Oregon.
Master Artist in Residence | Atlantic Center for the Arts (New Smyrna Beach, Florida)
Wilson leads a select group of choreographers, dancers, performers, scholars and researchers interested in physical/movement and verbal conversations on belonging and not belonging, esp. regarding citizenship and civic duty. Partially a research and developmental residency for Fist and Heel's 2015 work-in-progress.
Creative and Performance Residency | Alverno Presents- Lynden Sculpture Garden (Milwaukee, Wisconsin)
For this fifth collaboration between Alverno Presents and Lynden Sculpture Garden, Reggie will present his latest work, Moses(es), a look at the many representations of Moses in the mythical, canonical, and ethnographic imaginations, to ask: how do we lead and why do we follow? Joined by his Fist & Heel Performance Group and members of diverse Milwaukee communities, and set to live vocalizations from the African diaspora, Reggie is making a site-specific iteration of Moses(es) especially for the Sculpture Garden.
Rehearsal Residency- Extended Life Program | LMCC/Governor’s Island (New York)
Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Extended Life program showcases choreographers whose work demonstrates a strong understanding of site, space and architecture, challenges notions of form, and inspires an investigative spirit.
Dance and Dramaturgy Conferences | Gray Center, High Concepts Lab (Chicago, IL)
A panel discussion focusing on choreographic process, dramaturgy and the body, moderated by Chicago Dancemakers Forum Executive Director Ginger Farley and Reggie Wilson and UChicago’s Department of Mathematics faculty member Jesse Wolfson will engage in a public conversation about their collaboration on the dance production Moses(es).
Hatchery Project Rehearsal Residency | Chocolate Factory (New York)