Camille A. Brown

Camille A. Brown was first known in the dance world as a powerhouse dancer with expansive reach and bravura. She has been lauded as explosive and articulate. A force of nature. Those kinds of movement descriptions are also metaphors for a roadmap of her rich career. In addition to her dancing, Brown is an award-winning choreographer, an artistic director, a teacher, a community activist. Cover girl of Dance Teacher magazine, twice the poster image for Jacob’s Pillow, and brand Ambassador for Curls, a leader in the natural hair care industry. She was the first woman to receive the prestigious Princess Grace Award for Choreography. She is also the winner of a Guggenheim, and a Bessie, a Doris Duke Award, and other noteworthy awards too numerous to mention. 

Her relationship with the Pillow spans the gamut, appearing first as a dancer in 2002. Her company, Camille A. Brown and Dancers, first appeared at the Pillow in 2010, premiering works in the Doris Duke Theatre. She has returned several times since then. She and choreographer Kyle Abraham were commissioned by the Pillow to produce a joint show called Kyle and Camille. She co-directed a program in the School at Jacob’s Pillow. She has conducted Creative Development Residencies in the off-festival months. She and her company have performed on the Gala on two occasions. And she was the well-deserving recipient of the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award in 2016.  

For the 2013 Gala, Brown performed her solo The Evolution Of A Secured Feminine (2007). Set to a suite of standards, the exquisitely danced piece is evocative of a sense of women, different kinds of women, or perhaps the same woman at different stages of her life. With her face mostly concealed by a hat, Brown trusts that her body will communicate the sense of this woman, especially paired with the voices of Betty Carter and Ella Fitzgerald. Her crisp, punctuated movement is simultaneously fluid. She sets the bar high for the rest of the dancers. 

As a dancer, Brown has been called a fabulous performer with technical bravura. As a choreographer, she could depend on that talent as a mover to guide her choreography. But, she has never been choreographically interested in movement for movement’s sake; rather, she wants to make dances that present “a story using every aspect of the arts.”  She draws on her interests in theater, books, film and music—from 1930s jazz to hip-hop—as well as history, current events, and close observations of daily life. 

 An example of her interest in history is Matchstick (2009), which was performed at the Pillow in 2010. Brown conceives of this work as set in the South, fifty years after the end of the Civil War and fifty years before the Civil Rights Movement. It was during this period of the Great Migration when more than a million African Americans left the South for opportunities in the North and the Midwest. The four men in the piece gesture, stand, stomp, and slump through this choreographic discussion on whether to leave home and seek a life of better prospect. 

In 2016, Brown choreographed Cabin in the Sky (1940) for New York City Center’s Encores! series, which presents infrequently performed musicals. Choreographer George Balanchine directed the original production, and Katherine Dunham performed in it, receiving choreographic credit much later. When interviewed about the production, Brown acknowledged the rarity of the opportunity and her familiarity with the story from her perspective. “I’m a black female choreographing for a theater show. How often does that happen? What does it mean for me to step into that role and tell the story the way I know it?” Close Brian Seibert, “‘Cabin in the Sky’: Translating a Dated Body Language” The New York Times, February 4, 2016 

Theatre critic Jesse Green applauded Brown’s choreography for helping to lift the production from its “built-in limitations,” going on to say,  

“It was really only in her vivid and unusual dances, based on contemporary social forms but feeling at the same time oddly angled and modern, that the world of A Cabin in the Sky achieved a specific physical life. She tells her own story, not someone else’s—and, ultimately, that may be the best reason for Encores! to keep exploring the difficult tradition from which A Cabin in the Sky arose. Appropriated stories should eventually be taken back.” CloseJesse Green, “Theater Review: Encores! Tries to Renovate Cabin in the Sky.” Vulture February 11, 2016 

Brown talked about her use of social dance in the work, saying, “The thing to remember about social dance is that it was very specific to a time period but also very open to creative identity. There is a specific structure but it’s up to the individual to put what their take is.”  CloseSeibert, The New York Times 

A Pillow commission with Brown and choreographer Kyle Abraham received a joint commission from the Pillow that resulted in a rare opportunity for the talented dancers/choreographers to collaborate.