60 Cove St
Portland, ME 04101
USA
Join visual artist, co-founder and Artist Director of Indigo Arts Alliance, Daniel Minter in conversation with choreographer Reggie Wilson.
Join visual artist, co-founder and Artist Director of Indigo Arts Alliance, Daniel Minter in conversation with choreographer Reggie Wilson, moderated by Marcia Minter, co-founder and Executive Director of Indigo Arts Alliance. This virtual talk is presented in partnership with Indigo Arts Alliance and Bates Dance Festival.
Minter and Wilson have been engaged in generative dialogue on the overlaps that inform both of their practices for nearly three years. The artists have been connected through their relationship as Artists in Residence with the Lynden Sculpture Garden. Rhythm and Pattern: A Conversation with Daniel Minter and Reggie Wilson, will present a unique opportunity to experience a sneak peek into the minds of two important African American artists working in very different mediums yet connected by history— past, present and future.
This event is free, open to all, and takes place LIVE on Zoom.
Daniel Minter is the 2021 Joyce Foundation award recipient whose project “In the Healing Language of Trees” is being created in collaboration with the Lynden Sculpture Garden in Milwaukee. Minter’s concept for this commission—” is to bring his wood-carving techniques to bear on the deadly impact of emerald ash borer on our trees.” Drawing on traditions of the African Diaspora, and invoking axé, the “spiritual force that resides in all living things,” Minter envisions an ash trunk adorned with necklaces of giant, hand-carved wooden beads created in collaboration with community members, including those engaged in Lynden’s Call & Response and HOME refugee programming. This year, 2022, Minter continues his return trips to Milwaukee to complete the sculpture while teaching art educator workshops. There will be a culminating symposium on the project later this year. More information on the Joyce Awards here.
Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group is a Brooklyn-based dance company whose mission is to create, research, develop, and present new performance work that investigates the intersections of culture and movement practices. The Company’s body-of-work draws from the spiritual and mundane traditions of Africa and its Diaspora; Fist and Heel believe in the potential of the body as a valid means for knowing. This summer, Wilson will be working with Portland, Maine community participants in a dance experience project entitled “…together, they stood shaking, while others began to shout”. This project will engage participants from June 27-July 10 by using movement vocabulary and dances from the company’s Shaker-inspired dance Power. The dance will be presented outdoors on the Bates College Campus with a public performance on July 11th (rain date: July 12) as a part of Bates Dance Festival. For more information on upcoming programming click here.
POWER re-imagines compelling core Shaker values, contributions, practices and histories through a postmodern American lens. In this kinesthetic, propulsive, rhythmic experience connecting American Black and Shaker traditions, Wilson explores the body as a radical tool for illuminating the internal and communal. Following his own visceral, obsessive curiosity, Wilson draws inspiration from Rebecca Cox Jackson, a free Black woman who became a Shaker eldress and formed her own community in Philadelphia—as well as the Shakers’ complex relationship to free and enslaved African-Americans. Through his framework of African formalism, applying postmodern, avant-garde movement with Black dance traditions, Wilson discovers what’s possible when ecstatic bliss meets structural rigor.
POWER will be presented at The Bates Dance Festival July 15 & 17, 7:30PM, Schaeffer Theatre. More information and tickets here.