CEE | Center for Experimental Ethnography
Menu
GROUNDS THAT SHOUT! (And OTHER MERELY SHAKING)
Grounds that Shout! (And Others Merely Shaking)
Curated by award-winning choreographer Reggie Wilson, Grounds that Shout! (and others merely shaking) was a series of performances that respond to the layered histories of Philadelphia’s religious spaces through contemporary dance performances that addressed religion and movement as well as sacred African American practices, the body, and worship experiences. Over two weeks, eight choreographers and performance groups performed in four historic Philadelphia churches, drawing from site and spirit to present original and re-situated works of dance. This was a partnership between Philadelphia Contemporary, Partners for Sacred Places and Danspace Project (NYC). In addition to the performances, three public conversations offered further insight into the process and thinking behind the artistic production of Grounds that Shout!, and featured dialogues with key contributors as well as thinkers affiliated with the project’s themes.
Reggie Wilson's work in bringing together Grounds That Shout! resonated with the Center for Experimental Ethnography, especially as an example of what it meant to be engaged in social and humanistic inquiry through performative practice. We thought that documenting this project would provide a tremendous learning and research experience for graduate students in CAMRA, the affiliated graduate student group with CEE at Penn. Reggie Wilson came to a CAMRA meeting in 2018 and discussed his ideas about the project, meeting with enthusiastic reception. Gordon Divine "Dee" Asaah, then president of CAMRA, took the helm as the director of the soon-to-be-documentary, and worked to put together a crew of graduate students to document Reggies curatorial performance research and choreographic work. After visiting a number of Philadelphia’s churches, Reggie finally decided upon the Church of the Advocate, and three Society Hill Churches, including St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Old Pine Street Presbyterian Church, and Mother Bethel AME. Each of these churches has important cultural and religious significance to Philadelphia’s black communities.
On May 2, 3 and 4 of 2019, Reggie Wilson’s own Fist and Heel Performance Group performed at the Church of the Advocate after a two week residency, including performances by Germaine Ingram and David Brick. On May 11, the series culminated with a series of performances that literally wove through the society hill churches, dancing and acrobating through the streets, graveyards, and parking lots, with performances by Meg Foley, <fidget>, Lela Aisha Jones | FlyGround, Almanac Dance Circus Theatre, and Tania Isaac, and these performances included accompaniment from members of the church congregations. These performances were staged three times over the course of the day, and they were intense. The whole process of filming and participating opened up a vitalizing set of questions about extra-textual methods of ethnographic research, about space, and scholarly engagement, and especially about what it means as a Center to be asking these questions within a city beyond the walls of the University. As well as documenting the way Reggie built relationships with artists, CAMRA students documented how the performance was planned, the residencies, rehearsals, and final performances. Gordon Divine "Dee" Asah worked collaboratively with Reggie at every step, theorizing the ways that documentation could become a part of the GTS project, and asking classic questions in performance documentary in the process: What does it mean to document ephemeral time-based media? How can performative methods of research, choreography, andrelationship building be represented on film? How can this form of representation, and its requisit technical and laboring crew of machines, videographers and audio technicians, co-exist with the live performance in a symbiotic way?
From beginning to end this project of documentation allowed students and the Center to explore CAMRA and CEE's missions, and to experiment with doing a kind of social research that amplifies transformative practices, that makes spaces for creating and thinking collaboratively, and that aims to engage with multiple publics. After performances and shooting were done, Dee and Reggie worked together in intimate marathon editing sessions to piece together the archival footage, and negotiate a storyline out of their different perspectives.
CEE was excited to have Reggie Wilson as one of our two Spring 2021 fellows, for the 2020-2021 theme “futures unbound”. Like all our fellows, Reggie taught a course during his residency. Reggie's course, Kinesthetic Anthropology, was co-taught course with CEE Director Deborah Thomas. It asked students to think through what Africa and the African Diaspora can tell us about about what people are really doing when they dance, and how we understand the forms of communication that are happening.
Reggie Wilson's work in bringing together Grounds That Shout! resonated with the Center for Experimental Ethnography, especially as an example of what it meant to be engaged in social and humanistic inquiry through performative practice. We thought that documenting this project would provide a tremendous learning and research experience for graduate students in CAMRA, the affiliated graduate student group with CEE at Penn. Reggie Wilson came to a CAMRA meeting in 2018 and discussed his ideas about the project, meeting with enthusiastic reception. Gordon Divine "Dee" Asaah, then president of CAMRA, took the helm as the director of the soon-to-be-documentary, and worked to put together a crew of graduate students to document Reggies curatorial performance research and choreographic work. After visiting a number of Philadelphia’s churches, Reggie finally decided upon the Church of the Advocate, and three Society Hill Churches, including St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Old Pine Street Presbyterian Church, and Mother Bethel AME. Each of these churches has important cultural and religious significance to Philadelphia’s black communities.
On May 2, 3 and 4 of 2019, Reggie Wilson’s own Fist and Heel Performance Group performed at the Church of the Advocate after a two week residency, including performances by Germaine Ingram and David Brick. On May 11, the series culminated with a series of performances that literally wove through the society hill churches, dancing and acrobating through the streets, graveyards, and parking lots, with performances by Meg Foley, <fidget>, Lela Aisha Jones | FlyGround, Almanac Dance Circus Theatre, and Tania Isaac, and these performances included accompaniment from members of the church congregations. These performances were staged three times over the course of the day, and they were intense. The whole process of filming and participating opened up a vitalizing set of questions about extra-textual methods of ethnographic research, about space, and scholarly engagement, and especially about what it means as a Center to be asking these questions within a city beyond the walls of the University. As well as documenting the way Reggie built relationships with artists, CAMRA students documented how the performance was planned, the residencies, rehearsals, and final performances. Gordon Divine "Dee" Asah worked collaboratively with Reggie at every step, theorizing the ways that documentation could become a part of the GTS project, and asking classic questions in performance documentary in the process: What does it mean to document ephemeral time-based media? How can performative methods of research, choreography, andrelationship building be represented on film? How can this form of representation, and its requisit technical and laboring crew of machines, videographers and audio technicians, co-exist with the live performance in a symbiotic way?
From beginning to end this project of documentation allowed students and the Center to explore CAMRA and CEE's missions, and to experiment with doing a kind of social research that amplifies transformative practices, that makes spaces for creating and thinking collaboratively, and that aims to engage with multiple publics. After performances and shooting were done, Dee and Reggie worked together in intimate marathon editing sessions to piece together the archival footage, and negotiate a storyline out of their different perspectives.
CEE was excited to have Reggie Wilson as one of our two Spring 2021 fellows, for the 2020-2021 theme “futures unbound”. Like all our fellows, Reggie taught a course during his residency. Reggie's course, Kinesthetic Anthropology, was co-taught course with CEE Director Deborah Thomas. It asked students to think through what Africa and the African Diaspora can tell us about about what people are really doing when they dance, and how we understand the forms of communication that are happening.
Location |
Contact Us
PENN MUSEUM 336 |
© 2018 The Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania