In this charged and challenging world, Reggie Wilson, a choreographer one can depend on for dance artistry no matter the political climate, can get to the essence of feeling — the good, the bad and everything in between.
His new “The Reclamation,” performed at NYU Skirball over the weekend, is a powerfully solemn dance that, in part, repurposes material from his early works. That gestural vocabulary, over the course of an hour, becomes a rich blueprint illuminating how the past can meet the present on unaffected terms.
Much of the dancing in Wilson’s “Reclamation” has a gravity to it. While it does unspool into speedy passages in moments, the effect is more fleeting and frantic — not the kind that transports you to that happy dance place. The work, featuring seven authoritative performers from Wilson’s Fist and Heel Performance Group, including the magnetic Paul Hamilton, is intricately formal and something of a slow, methodical burn because of that.
At the start, the performers, one by one, take turns standing still at the front of the stage. Eventually, they all make their way to the back where they peel off layers of clothing and fold them with care before placing them in neat piles on the floor. It’s ritualistic — as if by shedding a shawl, they are reclaiming their skin.
Soon, they are dressed for the stage in Naoko Nagata and Enver Chakartash’s body-skimming separates, some adorned with pops of color. There’s an early postmodern vibe to both the dance-wear and to Wilson’s movement palette, which arranges and rearranges angular arms, backs that hinge over legs and jumps that send dancers spinning and landing on two feet. Even when the dancers shoot off into different directions, letting go of their precise spacing to vault themselves more loosely into space, they find their way back to lines, crossing the stage as a pack or splintering off in pairs. Dancers often mirror one another, but rarely do they touch.
Wilson’s soundtrack operates like a mixtape of sonic poetry. The blues singer Son House’s “Motherless Children” is followed by the Gladys Knight and the Pips recording of “I Can See Clearly Now,” which takes on a despondent tone as the dancers move forward with rocking feet that seem to be stuck in mud. At once listless and direct, they stare hard, especially as the lyrics paint a different picture: “Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind.” For this group, for this world, the days ahead don’t seem so sunshiny.
Wilson takes advantage of the width of the Skirball stage and spreads his cast — Hamilton is joined by Oluwadamilare (Dare) Ayorinde, Bria Bacon, Rochelle Jamila, Annie Wang, Henry Winslow and Miles Yeung — across its landscape expanse with duets that appear like visions. The vocabulary is reshuffled throughout, building, at times, to a more heated state as dancers circle the stage with long, loping runs and arms that stroke through the air as if it were water. The song “Helping,” performed by Tom Smothers, adds to the sense of turbulence with its lyrics, “Some kind of help is the kind of help we all can do without.”
Wilson, who finds ways to create grandness and scale with just seven bodies, ends his dance with the soulful “Touch a Hand, Make a Friend” by the Staple Singers. Its hypnotic chant, a hope for unity, turns into an order, delivered with a tinge of desperation in this recording, which has two words on repeat: “Touch somebody! Touch somebody! Touch somebody!”
The dancers skim the stage faster and faster, their feet puncturing the floor with sharp stomps and flickering footwork as their hands clap and slap their thighs. Eventually they each fall to the floor arranged in a semicircle and roll in slow motion, forming a large circle that becomes smaller and tighter. It’s stark and searing — again, a slow burn — and a testament to Wilson’s unspoken message: You can’t ignore the past, but you can reclaim it.
Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group
“The Reclamation” was performed April 4 and 5 at NYU Skirball; nyuskirball.org.
