Choreographer Reggie Wilson's ongoing, in-depth field research and extensive travels is a model of a 21st century artist working in a global context. Wilson's travels from Zimbabwe, Senegal, and Congo-Brazzaville to Trinidad and Tobago, and the Mississippi Delta have led him to question accepted concepts of time, space, and dynamics, and to continued collaborations with dancers throughout the world. This global context helps him distill and transform ritual and social dance and vocal forms, (such as Chicago- style Stepping, Pantsula, the Big Apple, field hollers, shouts...), post-modern task-based structures, contemporary movement techniques, and the movement languages and gestures of Africans in the Diaspora, to create what he calls "Post-African/Neo HooDoo Modern Dance." By experimenting with the existing tension and energies between tradition and innovation, he comes face-to-face with new methods of mining connections and disconnections in the spread of dance beyond the western avant-garde. Wilson sees Performance as a site of transcendence; building and manipulating energy in a space is a core aesthetic practice. Following a multi-year exchange and collaboration with the Senegal-based Congolese choreographer Andréya Ouamba, Wilson will premiere "The Good Dance-dakar/brooklyn" in the fall.

"Dance is always, always, always, an expression of culture. The body and perception of the body does not exist in a vacuum void of culture."