Finding freedom with the Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group

The curtain to the Zellerbach Theater stage was open, all scrims and flies pulled back to reveal the cement of the walls and rigging. A spidery structure of lights and metal braces circled the back of the stage. The floor was covered with heaps of silvery tinsel with touches of red. Looking abandoned, to stage left, was a large red canvas suitcase. The lights above were red and white. The recording of a woman’s voice talked on, barely audible over the chat of the audience as it settled in. The lights dimmed.

Reggie Wilson enters. Dressed in white coveralls with a splash of red, he surveys the audience, silently and affably. Finally, he introduces the company by simply naming them: the Fist and Heel Performance Group, then he moves to his left and begins pushing the tinsel into an enormous heap. Seven dancers dressed in wildly eccentric and motley red outfits enter and give their names, stating how long they have been with the company. For one its 24 months, for others it’s 24 years.

The five men and two women move to a corner upstage, where they stand with their backs to the audience. The men are tall and lean limbed, sleekly muscled; the women are small, compact and powerful.

While Louis Armstrong sings “Go down, Moses”, Wilson stuffs the tinsel into the suitcase. This looks like an impossible task: There’s so much of it. But how concise and sharp a metaphor for oppression, for slavery. When the frothy, glittery expansiveness of the self’s soul is stuffed into impossibly small confinement, suppressed and hidden away, but there nonetheless, waiting.

It is slavery, and the imperturbable necessity of the self to override and express itself within its worst bounds that is at the heart of this company. Its name refers to the reinvention of spiritual practices by enslaved Africans in the Americas. Forbidden from playing drums, they used “fist and heel” to create the rhythms necessary to their worship.

Wilson’s current piece, Moses(es), is set to an eclectic series of songs, each of which refers to the story of Moses. The biblical prophet represented the freeing of an oppressed people and had profound significance to the hoodoo practitioners of African America. According to Wilson, Moses(es) also references the writing of African American anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston and an encounter he had with a Moses scholar in Israel.

The music veered from Satchmo to The Klezmatics to the Ngqoko Women’s Ensemble to Bi Kidude, the Tanzanian Taarab singer, to the Blind Boys of Alabama, to mention a few. All the songs were strung together with live vocals composed by Wilson and sung by the company in solo and ensemble. Dancers Rhetta Aleong and Lawrence Harding, both longtime members of the company, were especially affecting in their measured call-and-response of a song whose solitary lyric was variations on the phrase “Eli, somebody call Eli for me.” While the other dancers lay in shadows, Aleong and Harding traced out a rhythmic pattern of back-and-forth walking in time to their singing.

The dancing, which moves seamlessly along with the music, is based on everyday movement – walking, turning, shaking, running, jumping – with the steps strung together in repeating combinations that move in an ordered and rigorous way through pathways across the stage. In one section, the individual dancers ran across the stage to jeté, then squat in a line, placing their hands on the preceding dancer’s waist. The line grew and shrank in a restless game of leapfrog, first in one direction, then another. The athleticism required for this repeating combination was mind-boggling, despite the simplicity of the individual steps and the off-hand way they were performed.

What the choreography of everyday movement creates in the viewer is a sense of nostalgia and poignancy. It’s a paean to the exquisite naturalness of the human body in movement. Always seemingly casual, always demanding and always breathtakingly beautiful.

Other sections were more enigmatic. Take, for instance, the following line, chanted sequentially by the various dancers, with Aleong in the lead: “One point six e double a, double b, double c.” Computer coding? Possibly. Mysterious? Very. And perhaps an ideal statement of the magic that has often been a part of the religious experience, but now exists in our most technologically obsessed culture.

Another dimensionally expansive moment was the singing and dancing of the admonition, “Don’t get lost, Moses, Moses, in that Red Sea.” The brightly red-garbed dancers embodied that frightful moment when the sea rolled back allowing the Jews to escape Egypt. Although we move always toward freedom, the journey is difficult and frightening. Shake off the fear, wade in the water, the dancers’s bodies seem to say.

Moses(es) ended with an old-fashioned battle of the dancers, when each dancer got to strut their stuff before the audience, stating their individuality in short bursts of energy and vying for the audience’s approval.

Approve they did.