OUR STORY

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. Reggie Wilson met with CEE and CAMRA at Penn in 2018 and discussed his ideas about his performance project. Gordon Divine 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.

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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 Asaah 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: 

From beginning to end, this project has been about doing 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.