| Reggie Wilson |
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mancc research highlights
Work in development: The Good Dance Collaborators: Andréya Ouamba [co-choreographer], Michel Kouakou and Fatou Cisse [1er Temps dancers], Anna Schon, Rhetta Aleong, Paul Hamilton, Marcel Gbeffa [Fist and Heel Performance Group dancers]. Wilson’s research combined with a multi-year exchange and collaboration of Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group and Congolese choreographer, Andréya Ouamba and his Company, 1er Temps (based in Dakar, Senegal) will be contextualized and incorporated into the performance work The Good Dance. Through this work, he is examining the influence of Central African culture on world performance forms, investigating the metaphoric, historic and real world parallels of the Mississippi and Congo rivers and their cultures. The choreography is developed and informed by Wilson’s research/fieldwork/exchange experience, and with The Good Dance has come full circle beginning with the Mississippi Delta, then the Caribbean, Southern Africa, West Africa, and now Central Africa juxtaposed with the Delta. A native of Milwaukee, Wilson’s family migrated up from the Mississippi Delta. Anthropological data collected to inform the new work, will include his own family history (2nd generation from the Mississippi Delta to Milwaukee), as well as Mr. Ouamba’s, who until recently called himself a Congolese refugee (1st generation from the Congo to Senegal).Biographies Reggie Wilson founded his company, Reggie Wilson/Fist & Heel Performance Group, in 1989. Wilson draws from the movement languages of the blues, slave and spiritual cultures of Africans in the Americas and combines them with post-modern elements and his own personal movement style to create what he calls "post-African/Neo-HooDoo Modern dances." His choreography has been presented both nationally and internationally on the Company and other prominent contemporary dance companies such as Dayton Contemporary Dance. Wilson was an artist advisor for the National Dance Project and is a Board Member of Dance Theater Workshop. He is the recipient of a McKnight National Fellowship and John Guggenheim Fellowship as well as a 2002 BESSIE Award for New York Dance and Performance.
Photos of December 2009 residency, taken during residency by Al Hall.
                 Photos of January 2009 residency, taken during residency by Kathryn Noletto, M.A. candidate in Dance Studio and Related Studies, Florida State University.        |
