Hyperallergic Features Grounds that Shout! (and others merely shaking)

Leeway board member, Germaine Ingram (ACG '12, LTA '08), Lela Aisha Jones (WOO '18, LTA '15) and Arielle Julia Brown's (ACG ‘18) performance Grounds that Shout! (and others merely shaking) is featured in Hyperallergic magazine.

PHILADELPHIA — When choreographer Reggie Wilson debuted his work … they stood shaking while others began to shout at Danspace Projectin 2018, he cited an unusual source of inspiration: a Black Shaker eldress named Rebecca Cox Jackson who led a small community of worshipers in Philadelphia in the 1850s and ’60s. Struck by the linkage between ecstatic Shaker dance, a visionary black woman preacher, and the dual identity of Danspace’s home, St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, as both an arts space and an active church, Wilson layered the ideas into his choreography.

This month, he revisited the project in Philadelphia at the invitation of Danspace in collaboration with Partners for Sacred Places and Philadelphia Contemporary. Dubbed Grounds that Shout! (and others merely shaking), the project — like the 2018 debut — put Wilson in the role of curator as well as choreographer. Over two weekends, he presented his own work alongside that of seven Philadelphia choreographers and dance companies who created performances at historic churches in response to his thematic network of spiritual histories, sacred spaces, ecstatic movement, and African diasporic experience.

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