Photo Credit: Christopher Duggan, courtesy of Jacob's Pillow Dance

Gray Center Lab in Midway Studios, 929 E. 60th St., Chicago

Free & open to the public.

Internationally acclaimed NYC-based choreographer Reggie Wilson and UChicago’s Department of Mathematics faculty member Jesse Wolfson will engage in a public conversation about their collaboration on the dance production Moses(es), which premiered at New York's Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2013.  Conversation topics will include Wolfson’s role as Math & Fractal Symmetry Consultant on this evening-length dance performance.  Grounded in Wilson’s re-reading of Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain, and informed by his exploratory travels to Israel, Egypt, Turkey and Mali, Moses(es) examines the migration of peoples and culture from Africa out into the world, paying attention to the effects migration has on beliefs.

co-presented by the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry and the Arts, Science & Culture Initiative.

About Reggie Wilson

Reggie Wilson founded his company, Reggie Wilson/Fist & Heel Performance Group, in 1989. Wilson draws from the cultures of Africans in the Americas and combines them with post-modern elements and his own personal movement style to create what he calls "post-African/Neo-HooDoo Modern dances."  His work has been presented nationally and internationally at venues such as Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York Live Arts, and Summerstage (NYC), Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival (Lee, MA), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), UCLA Live, and Redcat (Los Angeles), VSA NM (New Mexico), Myrna Loy (Helena, MT), The Flynn (Burlington, VT), Contemporary Arts Center (New Orleans), Dance Umbrella (Austin, TX), Linkfest and Festival e'Nkundleni (Zimbabwe), Dance Factory (South Africa), Danças na Cidade (Portugal), Festival Kaay Fecc (Senegal), The Politics of Ecstasy, and Tanzkongress 2013 (Germany). Mr. Wilson is a graduate of New York University, Tisch School of the Arts (1988, Larry Rhodes, Chair). He has studied composition and been mentored by Phyllis Lamhut; Performed and toured with Ohad Naharin before forming Fist and Heel.  He has lectured, taught and conducted workshops and community projects throughout the US, Africa, Europe and the Caribbean. He has traveled extensively: to the Mississippi Delta to research secular and religious aspects of life there; to Trinidad and Tobago to research the Spiritual Baptists and the Shangoists; and also to Southern, Central, West and East of Africa to work with dance and performance groups as well as diverse religious communities. He has served as visiting faculty at several universities including Yale, Princeton and Wesleyan Universities.  Mr. Wilson is the recipient of the Minnesota Dance Alliance's McKnight National Fellowship (2000-2001).  Wilson is also a 2002 BESSIE-New York Dance and Performance Award recipient for his work The Tie-tongued Goat and the Lightning Bug Who Tried to Put Her Foot Down and a 2002 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow. He has been an artist advisor for the National Dance Project and Board Member of Dance Theater Workshop.  In recognition of his creative contributions to the field, Mr. Wilson was named a 2009 United States Artists Prudential Fellow and is a 2009 recipient of the Herb Alpert Award in Dance. His evening-length work The Good Dance–dakar/brooklyn had its World premiere at the Walker Art Center and NY premiere on the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 2009 Next Wave Festival. In 2012, New York Live Arts presented a concert of selected Wilson works, theRevisitation, to critical acclaim and the same year he was named a Wesleyan University’s Creative Campus Fellow, received the 2012 Joyce Foundation Award for his new work Moses(es), and was named a Doris Duke Performing Artist. In 2013 Moses(es) had its NY premiere on BAM’s Next Wave Festival and is currently touring.