Take the Floor, if the Spirit Moves You

When you step into St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, you might not know that you’re standing on what was once the farm of Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch director-general. Or that the balcony in the church sanctuary was once known as a slave gallery. Or that the modern dance pioneer Ruth St. Denis performed there in 1933, long before it became home to Danspace Project in 1974.

You might not know that before 1959, the church had separate Sunday services for black and white congregants, or that in 1970 the Black Panthers held meetings in the rectory basement. And if you’re there for a performance presented by Danspace, you might not realize that the church still functions as a church.

“Some folks assume that the church doesn’t have a congregation or that it’s deconsecrated,” the choreographer and performer Reggie Wilson said on a recent afternoon. “That’s really not true. It’s a very active and politically active church.”

Wilson is the curator of “Dancing Platform, Praying Grounds: Blackness, Churches and Downtown Dance,” a series of performances, conversations and walking tours that will unfold in and around St. Mark’s over the next three weeks. Organized with Danspace’s executive director, Judy Hussie-Taylor, the series examines, among other themes, the connections between houses of worship and experimental dance in New York, with a focus on the history of Danspace, St. Mark’s and their surrounding blocks.

“It’s one of these things that’s right in front of us, but it doesn’t seem like anyone is talking about,” Wilson said about the importance of religious spaces in the largely secular world of contemporary dance.

“Considering how prevalent it is in New York, you’d think there would have been a lot more interrogation: the positive and negative relationships, the challenges, why it consistently happens,” he said. The program for “Dancing Platform, Praying Grounds,” he added, “is about cracking that open.”

As dancegoers know, St. Mark’s is not the only church in which downtown dance has thrived. The other prime example: Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, where the trailblazing Judson Dance Theater sprang up in 1962, giving rise to postmodern dance, and where Movement Research has hosted free weekly showings for more than 25 years. A partnership in a similar vein has been developing at Cadman Congregational Church in Clinton Hill, home to Brooklyn Studios for Dance since 2015.

Wilson said he was intrigued not just by churches but also by other spiritual sites hospitable to not-necessarily-spiritual arts, such as the Jewish-affiliated 92nd Street Y and the former Sufi mosque in SoHo that once housed Dia Center for the Arts.

For Hussie-Taylor, the complex subject always leads back to St. Mark’s: “Where are we actually standing?” she said. “What is this place? You could go in a million directions, but that’s a question we’ve returned to again and again.”

Wilson, 50, who grew up in Milwaukee and founded the company Fist & Heel Performance Group in 1989, has long explored spiritual traditions in his own work, particularly within African and African-American cultures. He said two lines of inquiry guided his dances: “What is the relationship between postmodern dance and African diasporic culture? And what is the relationship between Protestant Christianity and African diasporic religions? Even if the piece seems like it has nothing to do with either of those, they creep back in there.”

“Dancing Platform, Praying Grounds” — which runs through March 24, culminating in a new work by Wilson — is the latest in the Platform series initiated by Hussie-Taylor in 2010. Each platform, organized by a guest artist-curator, revolves around a particular theme or set of questions. Hussie-Taylor approached Wilson after seeing his 2013 work “Moses(es)” twice, first at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, then at St. Cornelius Chapel on Governors Island. In the afternoon light of the chapel, it struck her differently than it had in the theater. “It makes sense,” she said, “that Reggie’s work would read and resonate in a church space.”

Wilson said that he at first resisted taking on a curatorial role, preferring to stay focused on the time-consuming process of creating his own work. But, through discussions with Hussie-Taylor, the idea grew more appealing.

While Wilson led the platform planning, it was Hussie-Taylor who invited him to show a new piece of his own, which will have its premiere March 22. The site-specific " ... they stood shaking while others began to shout,” for eight dancers and three singers (including him), stems from his research into Black Shakers, chiefly the religious activist Mother Rebecca Cox Jackson.

“When I first heard about her, I was like, ‘a black Shaker!’ — that’s the biggest contradiction I’ve ever heard,” he said. “I just always imagined Shakers as white people, like Puritans.”

In an early rehearsal four dancers shuffled buoyantly through crisscrossing patterns based on a reconstructed Shaker dance, circling their arms in the air. The choreography will likely evolve. “I’ve always made my own folk dances,” Wilson said. “People are like, ‘Oh my God, where did you get that dance?'”

In excavating the history of St. Mark’s and its neighborhood, Wilson and the curatorial team — which also includes Lydia Bell and Kristin Juarez — worked with Prithi Kanakamedala, a historian and professor at City University of New York, who assembled a dossier of readings to share with the platform artists. Kanakamedala, whose research interests include New York’s 19th-century free black communities, is one of several scholars and artists who will lead walking tours of the East Village and Harlem as part of the platform.

“New York City’s churches have always been open to far more radical activity than I think people recognize,” she said. “We have this very Victorian idea of what a church is. But there’s something to be said about churches as radical spaces, in which dance just naturally becomes part of that radicalism.”

For three nights beginning March 8, five choreographers — Beth Gill, Jonathan Gonzalez, Miguel Gutierrez, Angie Pittman and Edisa Weeks — will respond to the dossier materials in a program titled “The Dossier Charrette: a series of working dance essays.” (A term from architecture, a charrette is an intense period of collaborative problem-solving.) The 10-minute works will be followed by discussion among the artists, audience members and Wilson. Wilson laughed at the heft of the dossier — it covers “the ice age to the present,” he said — and described it as “a set of points of departure for the artists to get more obsessed with.” Pittman, for instance, said she was most drawn to writings about precolonial Manhattan and its indigenous people, the Lenape.

The platform themes, she added, connected to her own history; some of her earliest dance experiences were as a liturgical dancer in a predominantly black church. In praise dance, she said, “you’re there to illustrate the presence of a higher power, or deflect attention from you to something that’s bigger than you. That’s huge for me as I engage with dance right now.”

The platform also includes a daylong symposium on March 10; an evening shared by Keely Garfield, Same As Sister (Hilary Brown and Briana Brown-Tipley) and Ni’Ja Whitson (March 15-17); and the publication of a companion catalog.

“I’m terrified, and I’m terribly excited,” said Wilson, adding that as both a curator and choreographer, he’s not seeking perfection.

“The platform for me isn’t trying to answer anything or display anything,” he said. “Hopefully it’s a way of opening more doors for conversation.”