Raja feather Kelly photo by Aitor Mendilibar
Reggie Wilson/Fist & Heel Performance Group's CITIZEN
Monday, August 8 at 7pm
(a co-presentation with the MV African American Film Festival)
Location: the MV Performing Arts Center
Wilson plummets down into CITIZEN’s subconscious levels asking the core questions, “What does it mean to belong” and “What does it mean to NOT want to belong.” This multidisciplinary work wrestles with the many implicit and explicit challenges, struggles, judgments, and webbing that exists between the anonymity of the individual and the experiences of being a citizen of one’s homeland or one’s adopted homeland. CITIZEN demands us to consider the contradictions imbedded in the co-existence of our individual self with our civil duties. Specific persons-of-interest in Wilson’s research are, African Americans in Paris and others in the Diaspora who fought for the human right to ‘belong’. Of recurring interest is Zora Neale Hurston who remained and returned to America even though many of her artist contemporaries went elsewhere. CITIZEN hopes to engage and connect audiences to perspectives and conversations regarding belonging, immigration/migration and the black and white of America.
Reggie Wilson/Fist & Heel Performance Group is a Brooklyn-based dance company that investigates the intersections of cultural anthropology and movement practices. Thier performance work is a continued manifestation of the rhythm languages of the body provoked by the spiritual and the mundane traditions of Africa and its Diaspora, including the Blues, Slave and Gospel idioms.
The Run&Shoot Filmworks MVAAFF is a five day event that showcases the works of independent and established African-American filmmakers. Established in 2002, the MVAAFF is one of the fastest growing film festivals.
"You could feel their uninhibited enthusiasm throughout...You also couldn’t miss the fluent spectrum of musical styles, from African worklike meters to rock music, with spirituals and other idioms in between. I enjoyed the various patterns and structures with which Mr. Wilson (who sang and played percussion but did not dance) got his dancers moving."
- Alastair Macaulay, New York Times (January, 2016)
The New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with additional support from the National Endowment for the Arts; with public funds from the Decentralization Program of the New York State Council on the Arts, administered in Kings County by Brooklyn Arts Council; Reggie Wilson/Fist & Heel Performance Group’s production, CITIZEN, is co-commissioned by The Hatchery Project, which is a collaboration of the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, RED Arts Philadelphia, Vermont Performance Lab, and The Chocolate Factory Theater; BAM for 2016 Next Wave Festival; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; An Offshore Creative Residency by The Yard; Baryshnikov Arts Center; New York City Center Choreography Fellow Residency;Research for CITIZEN was funded in part by the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award Program. This presentation of CITIZEN was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts' National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with additional support from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Yard Offshore Creation Residency