Dance: Two men walk into a dance commission

Reggie Wilson and Andréya Ouamba have been collaborating on "The Good Dance: Dakar/Brooklyn" for more than three years. The piece contemplates big topics -- the cultural and historic connections between the Mississippi River Delta and Central Africa's Congo River Basin, for one. Even with its long time frame and sprawling geographic, cultural and musical influences, the work is also about two people sharing a journey without surrendering their own strong wills.

"I like to be right," said Wilson in an interview last Tuesday.

"C'est vrai," Ouamba agreed without hesitation.

On a recent afternoon, members of Wilson's Brooklyn-based Fist & Heel Performance Group and Ouamba's Senegal-based Compagnie 1er Temps Danse rehearsed in the Walker Art Center's McGuire Theater, where "The Good Dance" will have its world premiere before going to the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival in December. They communicate in English and French while working out a taut fusion of contemporary dance and African-based rhythms, groaning a bit as they surf across each other's bodies on the bare floor.

Wilson watches from the stage, Ouamba from the seats. The two continue to navigate an artistic alliance that reaches back to a first meeting in Senegal in 2002 that led the Bessie Award-winning dance/theater-maker Wilson to create a solo for Ouamba, a Congolese dance creator who won the prestigious competition Danse L'Afrique Danse 2007.

"It sounds like collaboration is all about this other person, it's all lovey-dovey and embracing the other person," Wilson said during an interview prior to rehearsal. "But it boils down to a selfish creative act. The more you interact with somebody else, the more you are forced to articulate what is really important to you."

The artists recounted a disagreement over a rehearsal schedule. French speaker Ouamba, through a translator, said, "I didn't like his proposition, but I accepted it to see what would happen. I thought in the beginning that it wouldn't work, but I gave it the time. That is the real point: accepting what we don't wish for. I found something new in something I thought wasn't good."

Overall, the process has been positive. The artists have grown to appreciate their different work styles. Ouamba likes to use improvisation, which he says provides opportunities to rediscover the dancer's body in space. Wilson favors a more structured approach that helps him build upon movement idioms from the blues, slave and worship cultures to create what he calls "Post-African Neo Hoodoo Modern Dance."

The cross-aesthetic exposure has also expanded each artist's contemporary performance perspective so they can explore several interests, particularly the music of the Congo region and the Mississippi Delta, which grounds the more "ethereal" aspects of the dance, said Wilson. It also provides a significant memory touchstone for each choreographer. Ouamba reconnected with music from his home while Wilson turned to songs he recalls singing on Sundays.

They also identified common points of inspiration that led to explorations of moral traditions. The title "The Good Dance" stems from the idea that "in western culture, your moral value system is grounded in the guide book [Torah, Qur'an, Bible]," said Wilson. "A lot of Earth-based and African traditions are oral and also the body is organized in really specific systems." These are realized through rituals or ceremonies in which gesture and physical bearing have meaning. Rather than the "good book" there is the "good dance," a kinetic means of recognizing, and organizing, key human principles.

Wilson talked about the difficulty of being a movement-based person in a text-based culture. "There's a possibility of a whole bunch of information that we're not looking at or acknowledging" as we try to explain movement on the page. "What does that mean for the dancer?" he asked.

Or, for that matter, all of us: What have we been missing?

Caroline Palmer writes regularly about dance.