After the first few rehearsals with Reggie, I wasn’t really sure what to expect.  Each rehearsal felt so radically different that it was hard for me to figure out what connected them all together.  I could tell he was drawing from different sources, but beyond that I wasn’t really sure what held it together. The first session we worked on a solo that drew from gumboot dancing an Africa, the second was a solo that drew from ceremonial images, whereas the third was a piece that drew from a number of influences spanning as far as Cunningham and “Wuthering Heights”. I almost felt like it was from three different choreographers. 

Of course, all of it was from Reggie, and the answer of what brings all these things together is the most obvious one, if not the most intuitive: it is being generated from the same body.  In class Reggie was talking about the way people sometimes think of their dance training as something outside of them, and that it is only when we bring the training within the context of the body that it is really valuable.  In the end your “training” is expressed and limited by your body, and the sooner you acknowledge that as what connects you and keeps you going, the better. 

What does that mean in practice?  We’ve had a lot of discussion about the relevance of the mind/body dualism that plagues western thought.  To me Reggie’s work is proof of the body’s intelligence, an awareness that not only informs the rest of the self, but has the ability to analyze, identify commonalities in movement synthesize a smattering of different styles and energies into one being.  What makes working with Reggie exciting is his ability to narrow in on movement qualities in the most precise way, and then placing them in radical juxtaposition with each other. 

For example, when working with Raja in rehearsal, Reggie said that the move he was doing needed to be a cross between Fosse and Trisha Brown.  The suggestion at first seemed both absurd and impossible to combine such radically different movement styles. And then we watched Raja playing with it a few times until he had found exactly that: the essence of both choreographers in a single gesture.  In the context of choreography at large this combo lasts only for a moment, and just as quickly as it is found it is dropped and a new quality of movement takes place. The intelligence comes not only from being able to master all these different styles, something that can only be acquired through practice and repetition, but also connecting them all together through one body, tapping into your sense of weight and grounded-ness throughout while continue to find the nuanced shifts and changes of textures.