More on POWER
(Stage Production)
Project Description
POWER is the title of Reggie Wilson's new evening-length dance performance work. It reimagines compelling core Shaker values, contributions, practices and histories through a postmodern American lens. This work builds on Wilson's investigations related to the early evolution of African American spiritual worship in the pantheon of American Christian religions and expands on his research into ring shouts and African American worship. Points-of-inspiration for this work include black Shaker Eldress Mother Rebecca Cox Jackson, Shaker foundress Mother Ann Lee, The First Great Awakening and American Utopianism, Binary Opposition, and foundation research from his work The Littlest Baptist.
POWER re-imagines compelling core Shaker values, contributions, practices and histories through a postmodern American lens. This evening-length work is created with 8 dancers, 3 vocalists, lighting designer Jonathan Belcher and 2 costume designers (Naoko Nagata, Enver Chakartash).
Wilson’s key motivating questions:
What would the worship of Black Shakers actually have looked like? How were the general, core Shaker tenets of “heaven on earth” realized (social activism, pacifism, gender equality, celibacy and the confession of sin)? What are our misunderstandings about Shakers? These questions center and obsess around the black leader Eldress Mother Rebecca Cox Jackson as well as Shaker foundress, Mother Ann Lee. Both women, leading followers in 17th Century America where one wouldn’t assume there were women in such key positions, even less, black Shakers. Very limited documentation exists on specific black Shaker practices (pre-Civil War and Industrial Revolution America) but Wilson’s research seems to indicate correlations of Africanist retentions with Shaker beliefs and practices. These might include beliefs in a dual-Godhead, formations/patterns in worship, Shout retentions, fractal movement patterns, progressive thought and hard work, innovations, and advancements in technology as acts of worship.
Also, he ups his ante by revisiting (to learn more from) his 1995 work "The Littlest Baptist"; 1st attempt at incorporating his field research of Black shout traditions into contemporary experimental performance theater. This has impacted the new live vocal component which reflects deep research done on Shaker praise songs, Ring Shouts, Traditional African American Church songs, moans, and shouts, Trinidad & Tobago Spiritual Baptist trance and possession vocal techniques. This is in addition to generous on-going field work in Africa (South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Ghana, Cameroon, Senegal, Congo-Brazzaville, Egypt, and Tanzania).
—-
POWER
Book/Resource List – Reggie Wilson
(Roughly in order of importance)
“We Find No Harm in Dancing”: Shaker Marches and Dances [The Enfield Shaker Singers] {VIDEO}
The Men Who Danced: The Story of Ted Shawn’s Men Dancers and the Birth of Jacob’s Pillow 1933-1940 {VIDEO}
Called and Chosen: The Story of Mother Rebecca Jackson and the Philadelphia Shakers.
By Richard E. Williams
The Gift to be Simple: Songs, Dances and Rituals of the American Shakers
By Edward Deming Andrews
Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender, and Community in Early African American Women’s Writing
By Katherine Clay Bassard
Gifts of Power: The Writings of Rebecca Jackson, Black Visionary, Shaker Eldress
Edited with an Introduction by Jean McMahon Humez
In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose by Alice Walker
By Alice Walker
12 Years a Slave
By Solomon Northup
Shaker Textile Arts
By Beverly Gordon
Barton Mumaw, Dancer: From Denishawn to Jacob’s Pillow and Beyond
By Jane Sherman and Barton Mumaw
Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency
By Margaret Thompson Drewal
The Sanctified Church.
By Zora Neale Hurston
The Spiritual Baptist Faith: New World Religious History, Identity & Testimony
By Rev. Patricia Stephens.
Zora Neale Hurston on Florida Food: Recipes, Remedies and Simple Pleasures
By Fred Opie
Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today
By Denise Murrell
---
POWER
Resource/Book listing
Andrews, Edward Deming. 1962. The Gift to be Simple: Songs, Dances and Rituals of the American Shakers. New York, NY: Dover Publications, Inc.
Bassard, Katherine Clay. 1999. Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender, and Community in Early African American Women’s Writing. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Drewal, Margaret Thompson. 1992. Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Gordon, Beverly. 1980. Shaker Textile Arts. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 1984. The Sanctified Church. Berkeley, CA: Turtle Island.
Murrell, Denise. 2018. Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Humez, Jean McMahon. 1981. Gifts of Power: The Writings of Rebecca Jackson, Black Visionary, Shaker Eldress. Amherst, Massachusetts: The University of Massachusetts Press.
Northup, Solomon. 2014. 12 Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup. San Diego: Canterbury Classics.
Opie, Fred. 2015. Zora Neale Hurston on Florida Food: Recipes, Remedies and Simple Pleasures. Charleston, SC: American Palate: A Division of The History Press.
Sherman, Jane and Barton Mumaw. 2000. Barton Mumaw, Dancer: From Denishawn to Jacob’s Pillow and Beyond. USA: Weleyan University Press
Stephens, Rev. Patricia. 1999. The Spiritual Baptist Faith: New World Religious History, Identity & Testimony. London, England: Karnak House.
Williams, Richard E. 1981. Called and Chosen: The Story of Mother Rebecca Jackson and the Philadelphia Shakers. Metuchen, N.J., & London: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., &The American Theological Library Association.
Walker, Alice. 1983. In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose by Alice Walker. San Diego, New York, London: A Harvest/HBJ Book, Harcourt Brace Javanovich, Publishers.
---
VIDEOS
“We Find No Harm in Dancing”: Shaker Marches and Dances: The Enfield Shaker Singers {VIDEO}. Produced by Mary Ann Haagen.
The Men Who Danced: The Story of Ted Shawn’s Men Dancers and the Birth of Jacob’s Pillow 1933-1940 {VIDEO}. Produced and directed by Ron Honsa. 1985. Worldwide Distribution: Moving Pictures.
VIEW MORE
Funding Credits
POWER 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; was co-commissioned by Jacob’s Pillow alongside with Hancock Shaker Village, created in part during multiple residencies in the Pillow Lab which included deep research at Hancock Shaker Village and premiered at Jacob’s Pillow July 10, 2019. POWER is made possible with public funds from the Decentralization Program of the New York State Council on the Arts, administered in Kings County by Brooklyn Arts Council; this project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Fist and Heel’s programs are also made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts with funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation; in part by Dance/NYC’s Dance Advancement Fund, made possible by the Ford Foundation; NYC COVID-19 Response and Impact Fund in The New York Community Trust; Howard Gilman Foundation; Mosaic Network Fund Initiative; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature; Mid Atlantic Arts Resilience Fund made possible by the American Rescue Plan through the National Endowment for the Arts; and the kind support of our many individual donors.