by Leigh Witchel
Like Shaker furniture, “POWER,” by Reggie Wilson’s Fist & Heel Performance Group, showed us how good a dance you can build from simple materials.
The substantial work was inspired by the life of Mother Rebecca Cox Jackson, a mystic who headed an urban Shaker community, primarily of Black women, in Philadelphia. On learning of her, Wilson was inspired to imagine what the community might have been.
The aesthetic for “POWER” went from simple Shaker to stripped Post-Modern: The stage was open, with no fixtures or soft goods; as the lights slowly brightened to indicate the start, the cues of the production crew could be heard from the audience. There were three skirts left onstage uninhabited: two scattered on the ground and one standing upright like a carapace. In the downstage right corner, there was a bench.
With a slightly pained walk, Wilson wandered out. While singing with a vibrato, he folded up and moved the skirts across the stage. The song was “Simple Gifts,” but it took time to recognize; it had been transformed into a Black spiritual. Possibly the best-known Shaker hymn, the song wasn’t familiar outside Shaker circles before Aaron Copland worked it into the score of Martha Graham’s “Appalachian Spring.” So from the first notes, Wilson journeyed towards the heart of the Black, Shaker and dance communities.
Nine dancers, five men and four women, wearing unadorned dark practice clothing, filed out on the diagonal. As Shakers would, they entered in two lines separated by sex. Most crossed the stage and left; three women remained behind and put on the skirts to dance a trio as a triple solo.
Wilson’s vocabulary throughout “POWER” was basic and weighty, legs raised to the side and dropped earthwards, bounces, twists, spins, thudding hops. It made sense in context as the kind of worship you might have seen in a Shaker meeting.
The men returned in overalls and helped the women on with shawls. Both sexes helping each other to change clothing did strike an odd note in a dance inspired by a community that segregated by sex, but that segregation was a reference point in “POWER,” not a rule.
Wilson’s structure, both spatially and in build, was more complex. A hymn that sounded like a long wail dissolved into a slow chant. A clapping square dance exchanged positions to propulsive rhythms. The dancing continued in unison, changing facings with a few dancers departing the group one by one. They returned back in Shaker costume to do a dance with movement taken from prints and drawings: holding the hands out front and downwards with loose wrists, shaking. The rest of the cast clapped at the sides; Wilson watched the dancing from the bench downstage right and others joined him, or they changed outfits at an area past the bench off the stage. Some dancers clapped with a simple beat, Wilson and a few others in a complicated counterpoint.
Wilson didn’t see “POWER” as happening in only one time period, whether the 19th century or now. The soundtrack was a collage ranging from the Staple Singers to Meredith Monk; the next quartet was done to gospel house that slowly got louder. At the sides, you could see dancers grooving to the pounding beat, and in the audience, people tapping or bobbing their heads in sympathy.
The square got tighter and closer, then morphed with the entry of dancers into two squares, one for men and one for women. People were raising their arms overhead in praise. Wilson, at the side, went into transport, shaking his hands and waving a handkerchief. But what “POWER” had as well as ecstasy, and you saw it here, was structural texture. In a very effective contrast, the people in the square didn’t dance; they merely exchanged places. “POWER” didn’t concentrate on vocabulary, but structure and impulse.
After a female solo to claps and chanting, the dancers changed costumes again, to garments with more 18th century references: frock and tail coats as well as bonnets. We heard an a capella song with snatches of lyrics: “one by one, two by two, three by three.” A quartet lined up and exchanged places with the mystical potency of the four corners of the earth. That turned into Shaker circle dance with the women circling outside and the men in a closer orbit of celestial motion. As specific as Wilson was being culturally, he was touching on a mystical transport that fascinates us all.
The dancers slowly headed off in the same direction in shadow from the glowing brilliance of the cyclorama and the music diminished to a beat. It would have been a perfect ending, but the dance went on to a simple phrase done in groups, then a male duet and a series of solos that seemed more about dancing and less about the thesis of the rest of the piece. At 70 minutes without intermission, it felt like Wilson was trying to pad to evening length, and a slacking of the structure in a piece where structure was the best feature.
But the thread did return. The stage darkened slowly as a crescendo built with the people at the bench clapping in syncopation. The others wound and shook. Suddenly – the first thing in the whole dance that was sudden – the whole group shouted “HEY!” and we were plunged into a final blackout. Wilson led the curtain call in a small Shaker dance, and grooved as he exited at the back with the cast.
Despite the purity of structure and construction, as clean as a Shaker band box, Wilson was aiming for something visceral and transcendent. This was his imagining of a worship service as the followers of Mother Jackson would have lived it, and that release was the purpose of Shaker worship, as for many others.
“POWER” wasn’t about Jackson, but it led to her life, which even in summary sounds as fascinating and stubborn as any spiritual visionary. If there was a cleanliness to “POWER,” there was also a pungency. Perhaps the most pungent inference of all in Wilson’s imagining of the intersection of Black and Shaker spirituality was the notion that Black spirituality, like the Yiddish language, is a common tongue. No matter what variant or dialect, whether Shaker, African Methodist Episcopal, or any, at the core it would be mutually intelligible by any other member of the community.
copyright © 2022 by Leigh Witchel
“POWER” – Fist & Heel Performance Group
Harvey Theater at BAM Strong, New York, NY
January 13, 2021
Cover:
Cover: Fist & Heel Performance Group in “POWER.” Photo credit © Tony Turner.
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