Reggie Wilson’s Moses(es) has been adapted for a number of different venues and communities since it debuted in 2013, and the version he was to create for Lynden Sculpture Garden had special promise. This was, after all, a place with expanses of land and even a body of water (the Lynden pond isn’t quite the Red Sea, but it does contain plants resembling bulrushes). But summer thunderstorms forced Wilson and his company into improv mode, forcing them to move inside for a “rain delay” and leaving parts of the 90-minute dance-theater piece unperformed altogether.
But this Moses(es) was magical in its own way, a testament to Wilson’s particular approach to his art. As he told an audience last summer at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, “The premiere is never the end of the piece.” Given his Milwaukee roots—he grew up here and attended Rufus King High School—this promised to be an intensely personal variation on the project Wilson has been working on for more than five years.
Photo by Erik Ljung
It begins rather casually, with the dancers introducing themselves to the audience. In addition to the core members Wilson’s company, the Fist & Heel Performance Group, performers included members of The Jazzy Jewels (ages 65-80), current and former UWM Dance students, and the Jehovah Praise Dancers from the Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church.
Wilson didn’t hesitate to use the large ensemble and the expanse of the garden to create a quite different environment from his original conception of the dance (which included a disco mirror ball hanging above the stage). For the opening section here, the dancers were isolated, spread across the lawn. The music shifted from Klezmer to African percussion, and eventually, the dancers joined with chanting of their own.
The initial inspiration for Moses(es) was Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain, a retelling of the biblical story in folk-tale style. Individual gestures suggested isolated incidents from the story: a baby cradled in arms, leaders of a procession carrying tribal standards, and all manner of marching and movement—from military lock-step to animal-like scuttling, to drag-queen sashays.
But as with Wilson’s other work, Hurston was only the starting point. Wilson worked on Moses(es) with theater scholar Susan Manning, researching topics that included Hurston, the ancient African culture of Nubia, Zar ceremonies, hypnotic healing rituals from the Middle East and North Africa, and even fractals, geometric patterns that seem to bridge the gap between order and chaos. Moses(es), of course, doesn’t “read” like an encyclopedia entry, but the pan-cultural roots of the material are apparent in the striking juxtapositions of vocabulary and mood: struggle and celebration, earth and spirit, immediacy and timelessness.
From the opening, some performers moved onto a second “scene,” set around Charles Ginnever’s “Olympus,” an angular pyramid of Corten steel. They wore accessories that suggested the Sunday best of a host of churchgoers–skirts and hats made of wispy chiffon. The movement, meanwhile, suggested a struggle—a freeing from the gravitational force of the mountain that suggested Exodus itself, connecting the modern black church with the Old Testament struggles of former slaves.
The next section took place around and within Forrest Myers’ painted steel “Quartet,” a monumental, fractured outline of a cube. The dancers used the same vocabulary, lots of liquid movement of the arms alternating with fidgety bursts of energy, but they moved individually rather than as a group. Again, the mass of the sculpture pulled them in from the surrounding lawn, crawling slowly over the grass. And eventually, they all paraded into the tighter confines of a neighboring sculpture, a roofless square enclosure. There, nearly twenty of them created a roiling cauldron of energy as they sung a call-and-response field holler. Again the juxtaposition is striking–struggle and exhilaration, freedom and confinement.
The storm took both dancers and audience into the Lynden building, where Wilson led impromptu lessons in singing and syncopated clapping. Huddled with a hundred or so people in the tight quarters of the Lynden indoor gallery, Wilson used a shekere (a percussion instrument made from a gourd) to teach the crowd about polyrhythms, then adding those charged beats to the sung spiritual chant, “Eli, Eli.” The members of the Jazzy Jewels had enough room to do a version of a sort of musical-chair line dance. In the original version, this is an athletic climax to the piece, six dancers crouching down in a diagonal line, then scattering, circling and returning again to the same line. In crowded room, it had the appropriate atmosphere of a revival meeting.
The rain abated enough to allow the finale, which brought the entire ensemble out onto the wide green, then sent them around the Lynden’s pond, where they gathered on another shore. It was stately, celebratory. One of the central gestures was sort of bow—hands oustretched, then slow bend at the waist. The Jewels gathered in a sort of elders circle, some couples rhumbaed. There was jazz, there was “Mary, Don’t You Weep,” and in a finale nod to his Milwaukee roots, there was “By My Side,” from Godspell, one of the first performances Wilson worked on as a student at Rufus King.
