Reggie Wilson’s Power explores Black Shakers and spirituality (photo by Christopher Duggan / courtesy Jacob’s Pillow)
POWER
Brooklyn Academy of Music
Harvey Theater at BAM Strong
651 Fulton St. between Ashland & Rockwell Pl.
January 13-15, $25-$55, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org/power
Reggie Wilson and his Fist & Heel Performance Group — “Not Just Your Mama’s Post-Modern Dance Company” — return to their home borough of Brooklyn for the New York City premiere of Power, running January 13-15 at the Harvey Theater at BAM Strong. Held in conjunction with BAM’s annual celebration of MLK Day, Power is an exhilarating seventy-minute piece about freedom and spirituality set in the world of the Shakers, asking the questions “What would the worship of Black Shakers actually have looked like?” and “How were the general, core Shaker tenets of ‘heaven on earth’ realized (social activism, pacifism, gender equality, celibacy, and the confession of sin)?”
Choreographed by Wilson and inspired by Black Shaker Eldress Mother Rebecca Cox Jackson, Shaker foundress Mother Ann Lee, the First Great Awakening (the Evangelical Revival), and American Utopianism and Binary Opposition (as well as Wilson’s 1995 The Littlest Baptist), the work is performed by eight dancers and three vocalists, with costumes by Naoko Nagata and Enver Chakartash and lighting by Jonathan Belcher, featuring songs by the Staple Singers, Bessie Jones & St. Simon’s Island Singers, Meredith Monk, Craig Loftis, Omar Thiam with Jam Begum & Khady Saar, and others. Power was developed at Danspace Project, then Jacob’s Pillow and the nearby Hancock Shaker Village.
“The idea of spirituality, religiosity, being able to be manifested with the body in relationship with other bodies is something really kind of exciting, so when I heard specifically about Mother Rebecca Cox Jackson in Philadelphia having a Black Shaker community, it seemed like there were two worlds that I had never actually put together in my imagination,” Wilson says in the above BAM behind-the-scenes video. “It also seemed parallel to my eternal and ongoing obsession with thinking about Black and Africanist traditions in relationship to white or postmodern performance or religions.”
Power is part of BAM’s program “A New York Season,” which continues with Pam Tanowitz Dance’s Four Quarters and Kyle Abraham’s An Untitled Love in February and SITI Company’s The Medium and Mark Morris’s L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato in March.