POWER

Overview

Award-winning choreographer Reggie Wilson offers up a whirling, rhythmic, exalted expression of Black Shaker worship through music and movement.

Did you know there was a Shaker community led by a free Black woman in Philadelphia in 1859? Folding his research of Shakers into this history, Wilson gives his perspective on what the community of Mother Rebecca Cox Jackson may have looked like.

Throughout his career, Wilson has sought out the varied histories and spiritual practices of Africa and its diaspora to develop his own personal movement style, which he sometimes calls “post-African/Neo-HooDoo modern dance.”

Returning to FringeArts, Wilson and the Fist and Heel Performance Group offer audiences a simple gift: a powerful reflection on Black Shakers’ practices.

“Wilson’s poetic work often has historical resonance.” — The New York Times

GET INTO THE SHOW
Watch the trailer.
Read The Imminent Potentiality of Living Black Art, an essay about POWER, The Köln Concert, and We Have Gone As Far As We Can Together by jaamil olawale kosoko.

SUPPORT
Lead support is provided by the William Penn Foundation.

Festival Producers
Chris Deephouse and Donna Hunt
Festival Co-Producers
Lynne Y. Strieb philand Bert Strieb
Judith Tannenbaum 

About the Artist

The Company’s name, Fist and Heel, is derived from enslaved Africans in the Americas who reinvented their spiritual traditions as a soulful art form that white and black authorities dismissed as merely ‘fist and heel worshipping'.

Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group is a Brooklyn-based dance company whose mission is to create, research, develop, and present new performance work that investigates the intersections of culture and movement practices. The Company’s body-of-works draw from the spiritual and mundane traditions of Africa and its Diaspora; Fist and Heel believes in the potential of the body as a valid means for knowing.

The choreography of Reggie Wilson displays rigor, structure and craft in a postmodern dance vernacular. His choreography expands the limitations of textbook definitions of ‘black dance’ and range from strict dance pieces to full, all-inclusive performance art pieces with arranged vocalizations, text, and inclusion of other media. Fist and Heel’s performance works strive for authenticity and respect of Reggie Wilson’s creative vision.

Credits