Who: Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group and a large, intergenerational cast of local dancers and community members including the Roselette Dancers from the Clinton Rose Senior Center and the children participating in our collaborative camp with Walker’s Point Center for the Arts.
What: CITIZEN: a dance about belonging, and not belonging. When: Saturday, July 28 at 2 pm (shuttle buses start running at 12:30 pm from the Brown Deer Road Park & Ride) Where: On the grounds of the Lynden Sculpture Garden, 2145 West Brown Deer Road, Milwaukee, WI 53217 Tickets: $25/$20 Lynden members/$15 students. Buy tickets online at https://www. Audience members are welcome to come early to picnic and to see Ibile’s Voices, the work of artist-in-residence Arianne King Comer and the many community members who have joined her around the dye pot this month.
This performance of CITIZEN is the culmination of a three-week residency at Lynden. Using the same methodology he piloted at Lynden in 2015 to adapt Moses(es), Reggie Wilson has been remaking CITIZEN for a large, intergenerational cast of local dancers and community members—many of whom actively address citizenship in their daily lives. CITIZEN began, three years ago, as an exploration of the meaning of citizenship for iconic African Americans who chose (choose) to remain at home in the face of pervasive racism. Wilson’s investigations were shaped by two questions: What does it mean to belong?and What does it mean to NOT want to belong? As he examined the questions raised by the human desire to belong, others arose: Do the injustices in today’s America engender a feeling of belonging? What supports belonging? And, finally: Is a sense of belonging, or not belonging, a private or a public matter? Like many of Wilson’s dances, CITIZEN privileges the kinesthetic over the cerebral, and makes a strong case for using dance to raise questions, express difficult ideas, offer alternatives, and provoke dialogues. This is a Call & Response event.
The Milwaukee iteration of CITIZEN, and the Call & Response programming of which this residency and performance are part, were made possible through the generous support of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, the Herzfeld Foundation, the Brico Fund, and Chipstone.
Fist & Heel Performance Group
Reggie Wilson/Fist & Heel Performance Group is a Brooklyn-based dance company that investigates the intersections of cultural anthropology and movement practices and believes in the potential of the body as a valid means for knowing. Our 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 group has received support from major foundations and corporations and has performed at notable venues in the United States and abroad. About Reggie Wilson
Milwaukee native Reggie Wilson (Executive and Artistic Director, Choreographer, Performer) founded his company, Reggie Wilson/Fist & Heel Performance Group, in 1989. Wilson draws from the cultures of Africans in the Americas and combines them with post-modern elements and his own personal movement style to create what he often calls “post-African/Neo-HooDoo Modern dances.” His work has been presented nationally and internationally at venues such as Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York Live Arts, and Summerstage (NYC), Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival (Lee, MA), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), UCLA Live, and Redcat (Los Angeles), Linkfest and Festival e’Nkundleni (Zimbabwe), Dance Factory (South Africa), Danças na Cidade (Portugal), Festival Kaay Fecc (Senegal), The Politics of Ecstasy, and Tanzkongress 2013 (Germany). Wilson is a graduate of New York University, Tisch School of the Arts and has lectured, taught and conducted workshops and community projects throughout the US, Africa, Europe and the Caribbean. He has traveled extensively: to the Mississippi Delta to research secular and religious aspects of life there; to Trinidad and Tobago to research the Spiritual Baptists and the Shangoists; and also to Southern, Central, West and East Africa to work with dance/performance groups as well as diverse religious communities. He has served as visiting faculty at several universities including Yale, Princeton and Wesleyan. Mr. Wilson is the recipient of the Minnesota Dance Alliance’s McKnight National Fellowship (2000-2001). Wilson is also a 2002 BESSIE-New York Dance and Performance Award recipient for his work The Tie-tongued Goat and the Lightning Bug Who Tried to Put Her Foot Down and a 2002 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow. In recognition of his creative contributions to the field, Mr. Wilson was named a 2009 United States Artists Prudential Fellow and is a 2009 recipient of the Herb Alpert Award in Dance. In 2012, New York Live Arts presented a concert of selected Wilson works, theRevisitation, to critical acclaim and the same year he was named a Wesleyan University’s Creative Campus Fellow, received the 2012 Joyce Foundation Award for his new work Moses(es), and was named a Doris Duke Performing Artist. In 2013 Moses(es) had its NY premiere on BAM’s Next Wave Festival and continues to tour. Most recently, Wilson was curator of Danspace Project’s Dancing Platform Praying Grounds: Blackness, Churches, and Downtown Dance (Platform 2018) and created the commissioned work “…they stood shaking while others began to shout” specifically for the space at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery.
About Call & Response
Call & Response is a summer-long project that gathers a community of artists who share a commitment to the radical Black imagination as a means to re-examine the past and imagine a better future. Many have a history of working individually and collaboratively at Lynden: choreographer Reggie Wilson, visual artist Folayemi Wilson, filmmaker Portia Cobb, textile artist Arianne King Comer, and chef/food anthropologist Scott Barton. Others are new this summer: poet Duriel E. Harris, visual artist Tyanna Buie. More information at: https://www. About the Lynden Sculpture Garden
The Lynden Sculpture Garden offers a unique experience of art in nature through its collection of more than 50 monumental sculptures sited across 40 acres of park, lake and woodland. The sculpture garden is open to art and nature lovers of all ages daily, 10 am-5 pm and Wednesdays 10 am-7:30 pm; closed Thursdays. Admission to the sculpture garden is $9 for adults and $7 for students and seniors; children under 6 and members are free. Annual memberships are also available. |
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Lynden Sculpture Garden
2145 W. Brown Deer Rd. Milwaukee, WI 53217 [email protected] http://lyndensculpturegarden. |