T H E C O M P A N Y
Reggie Wilson/Fist & Heel Performance Group is a Brooklyn based dance company which blends contemporary dance with African traditions. The company makes brilliant new performance from the spiritual traditions of the African Diaspora. Wilson draws on the movement idioms of Blues, Slave and Worship cultures to create what he calls “Post-African Neo Hoodoo Modern dance”. Accompanied by their own driving rhythms — body percussion, aspirated breath, singing and shouts — Fist & Heel blends deep ritual into potent, beautiful and energizing contemporary dance.
The Story of “Fist and Heel”
“Fist and heel is clapping and stomping, shouting and hollerin’ – and the manipulation of energies” explains Reggie Wilson. “Drums denied and confiscated, enslaved Africans reinvented their spiritual tradition in the Americas as a soulful art form white authorities dismissed as merely “fist and heel worshipping.”
Reggie Wilson (Artistic Director, choreographer and performer) 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 work has been presented nationally and internationally at venues such as Dance Theater Workshop, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), UCLA Live (Los Angeles), The Flynn (Burlington, VT), Contemporary Arts Center (New Orleans), Dance Umbrella (Austin, TX), Summerstage (NYC), Linkfest and Festival e’Nkundleni (Zimbabwe), Dance Factory (South Africa), Danças na Cidade (Portugal), and Festival Kaay Fecc (Senegal), The Politics of Ecstasy (Berlin, Germany).
Wilson 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 the Southern, Central, West and East of Africa to work with dance and performance groups as well as various religious communities.
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 with Ohad Naharin’s NY-based company before forming his own Fist and Heel Performance Group. He has lectured, taught and conducted extended workshops and community projects throughout the US, Africa, Europe and the Caribbean. He has served as visiting faculty at several universities including Yale, Princeton and Wesleyan Universities. He 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. Most recently, in recognition of his creative contributions to the field, Wilson was named a 2009 United States Artists Prudential Fellow and is also the 2009 recipient of the Herb Alpert Award in Dance.
His collaborative evening-length work, The Good Dance – dakar/brooklyn had its World premiere at the Walker Art Center in November 2009 and NY premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in December 2009 followed by a ten city US tour. Presently he is working on theRevisitation an evening of works to be presented at New York Live Arts March 14th- 17th. His work (project) Moseses Project will be part of the BAM Next Wave Festival 2013.
