Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE

As I have worked in the Archives, I have noticed how advancing technology and evolving archival practices have incrementally affected the quality and the quantity of the research material that spans the decades. The grainy, black-and-white films of earlier performances have been supplanted by today’s richly-hued digital recordings shot from several different angles; documentation of other festival events—such as pre- and post-performance talks and interviews with artists—provide increased insight into the choreographers’ creative processes. The same is true of printed programs which have expanded to include informative essays by resident dance scholars. The result has been the establishment of a treasure trove of research material that has enabled me to trace the careers of significant dancers and choreographers who have visited the festival.

However, I have also found that a good number of those artists, including Ron Brown, made their Pillow debuts relatively early in their careers and have returned many times since. Consequently, the material that chronicles their multiple visits has grown exponentially, and it is impossible to condense it into a single essay. My solution in this entry is to simply limit my discussion of the artist to his earliest visits to the festival. Fortunately, records of those visits provide some of the deepest insight into his work, because they cover a period of his career (1994 to 2002) when several intersecting factors were having a profound impact on his development as an artist.

He was clarifying his research objectives as he traveled to study the dance, music, and other cultural elements of Africa and its diaspora. He was distilling thematic material that would recur in many of his dances; and he was formulating approaches to that material—for example, the incorporation of the spoken word into his choreography—that would continue to influence his work in the coming years. It was also a period when he was establishing relationships with other artists who would become important collaborators throughout his career. In other words, Brown’s early visits to the Pillow—like those of other African-American artists I have discussed in this series—can be thought of as an essential part of his development as a vital presence in the world of concert dance.

Brown also recalls that he had a certain ambivalence about pursuing the serious study of dance. During his high school years, there were periods when he attempted to concentrate on his other interests—writing and journalism—as possible career choices. However, the summer following his high school graduation, he decided to enroll in dance classes at Mary Anthony’s studio, and that began a period of training and searching that shaped the early stages of his artistic development.

Over the years, he would often recount the question one of his friends asked him when he was considering forming his company, “Who is going to tell your grandmother’s stories?”In 1985, Brown formed his company, Evidence. He named it after a solo he had choreographed a year earlier upon the death of a favorite uncle. He later spoke of the solo as “the most heartfelt thing I had ever done.” CloseTerry Trucco, “Dance; The Elusive Spark That Ignites the Choreographer,” New York Times, July 10, 1994, https://nyti.ms/298bJrk. His words are an indication of the central role that themes of family would play in the development of his choreographic voice. Over the years, he would often recount the question one of his friends asked him when he was considering forming his company, “Who is going to tell your grandmother’s stories?” CloseRon Brown, 25^th Anniversary, p. 17. This question seems to have been incised into the artist’s mind, leaving traces of inspiration that arced from the immediacy of himself and his family to the metaphysical implications of the human family/condition.

When Brown was later interviewed at the Pillow by Scholar-in-Residence Maura Keefe, he spoke of some of the earliest experience that shaped his direction as a young, emerging artist; and he also reflected on how he arrived at his commitment to make art that was not meant exclusively for an elite audience of concert dance connoisseurs. He wanted his work to be equally accessible to everyday people, because he wanted to tell their stories.

The group Brown brought to the Pillow in August, 1994 consisted of himself and six other dancers (Ciru Karanja, Crystal E. Simpkins, Cynthia Oliver, Earl Mosley, Niles Ford, and Renee Redding-Jones). A short entry in the printed program revealed some of the sociopolitical issues that Brown was increasingly exploring in his work, including those of race, class, gender, and the implications/challenges of assimilation. The program went on to describe how the company wanted their residencies to reach beyond the boundaries of the theatrical stage. Not only would the artists perform and teach master classes, they would participate in forums and engage with community members to discuss sociopolitical issues that were being explored in the dances they performed. With an approach that encouraged different perspectives, they hoped that forum participants who were acutely affected by the issues—as well as those who were less affected—would benefit from the exchanges. CloseProgram, Ron Brown EVIDENCE—Jacob’s Pillow 1994.

This use of art to help initiate change in various communities was an approach that was being explored by other black artists of the period (most notably Jawole Zollar and her Urban Bush Women) and it would continue to be used by socially conscious artists in the coming decades. Brown later alluded to the activist nature of his own work: “When a person steps into the world he represents his families, teachers and ancestors and must move forward with a sense of accountability and responsibility. To be evidence. I wanted Evidence, A Dance Company to present a sense of history and a reflection of the human condition, to be a company in which people could see themselves in stories, music and dance that celebrate who we are.” CloseRonald K. Brown, 25^th Anniversary, p. 17.

The proximity of the duet and the solo seems to further indicate the seamless nature of the artist’s life. This idea was later alluded to in a 2004 Dance Magazine article: “Ronald K. Brown, whose choreography seems to spring from a heart-centered spirituality, says that his spiritual search led him to honor the freedom of being true to himself. ‘In that way,’ says Brown, ‘my spirituality is fed by my being gay.’” CloseJoseph Carmen, “Gay Men & Dance,” Dance Magazine, November 2006, p. 58.

Brown ranged far and wide in his selection of music for Dirt Road. Junior and Buddy’s duet was danced to a collage of recorded music, including a song sung by gay-culture icon Sylvester and a mash-up of house/disco music. Those selections were another indication of the choreographer’s purposeful use of elements drawn from gay club culture. He often referenced those aesthetic choices, including his choreographic affinity for dance movement drawn directly from his club experiences: “As much as possible, I go out to a club at 4:00 a.m. on Saturdays and dance for five or six hours . . . . There are African people in this room who are just dancing, as they might in any basement. Club dancing and traditional dance are related and both have been informing my work.” CloseRon Brown, “Evolving Traditions,” Dance/USA Journal, v. 18, n.1, May 2001. In this, Brown referred to the common DNA that is shared by different forms of African-diaspora dance and music.

As mentioned earlier, Ronald K. Brown presented his first Jacob’s Pillow concerts during a period when he was solidifying his dance aesthetic. He later reflected, “By 1994, things started to gel . . . . The integration of text with large, powerful movement and gesture, and the fusion of traditional Western African dance with modern dance, began to feel right.” CloseRose Eichenbaum, “Leap of Faith,” Dance Magazine, January 2000, p. 64. Dance historian Suzanne Carbonneau elaborated on the importance of that year in the PillowNotes of a later program: “It was a trip to Senegal and the Ivory Coast in 1994, however, that weighted Brown’s work so decisively toward the African. There, too, Brown explored not only traditional dance but also social and club dancing, the rhythms, impulses, energy, and movements of which suffused his vocabulary, determined his themes, and charged his staging.” CloseSuzanne Carbonneau—PillowNotes—Jacob’s Pillow Dance—Ted Shawn Theatre—July 6 – 10, 2005—Ronald K. Brown/Evidence and Nnenna Freelon, Jacob’s Pillow Archives. During his trips to Africa, Brown engaged in valuable artistic exchanges with members of Rokiya Kone’s company, Jeune Ballet d’Afrique, and Souleymane Koly’s company, Ensemble Koteba D’Abijan.

Three years later, Brown established another connection with Africa and the Pillow, when he performed Asadata Dafora’s solo, Awassa Astrige (“Ostrich”), at the 65^th Anniversary Opening Gala in 1997. As the first African artist to perform at the festival in 1942, Dafora held a special place in its history, and Brown’s performance of his work took place in the same theater where Dafora had performed. It was a stunning moment when the curtain parted to disclose that the space behind the stage was open to the outside, creating a sun-lit, natural backdrop for the performance. With rippling arms, Brown made an imperious progress across the stage, channeling Dafora’s paean to the magnificent bird of the title.

The title of the second dance on the program, Better Days, referred to an iconic New York bar and dance club that opened in 1972 and catered to a predominantly gay, African-American clientele. In an interview several years after his company’s second Jacob’s Pillow engagement, Brown explained how he had begun to develop the work by asking members of gay and lesbian community organizations what “better days” meant to them:

The question carried enormous weight at the time because of the impact the AIDS epidemic was having on gay communities. Dance scholar/theorist David Gere (who interviewed Brown for the 1999 program’s PillowNotes) described Better Days as “an evocation of gay dance clubs in pre-AIDS New York.” CloseDavid Gere, PillowNotes—Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, 1999.

In the book he later published, How to Make Dances in an Epidemic: Tracking Choreography in the Age of AIDS, Gere examines many of the factors that led a number of artists to choreograph works that commented on a troubling time in gay communities across America. As he observed, “From 1981, when the first cases of AIDS (then called GRID, or Gay-related Immune Deficiency) were identified by the Center for Disease Control, through the late 1980s and early 1990s, when AIDS deaths in the U.S. were approaching their grisly peak, the meanings surrounding AIDS actively proliferated, attaching themselves to the dancing body in a perversely symbiotic relationship. More specifically these meanings attached themselves to the male dancing body.” CloseDavid Gere, How to Make Dances in an Epidemic: Tracking Choreography in the Age of AIDS (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), pp. 40 – 41. Gere then goes on to further elucidate the reasons why gay men, dance, and AIDS, almost became synonymous.

Better Days was another instance of Brown’s reflections on the lives of black men and the complex relationships they develop with each other. In urban communities, gay bars and dance clubs had always functioned both as social centers—places to establish new friendships, reconfirm existing ones, and enjoy both—and as notorious places to find partners for fleeting sexual encounters. But by the early 1990s, the reality of the AIDS epidemic had cast a pall over the locales that had typically served as safe havens for gay men to openly celebrate who they were. In this light, the title Better Days suggests a meaning replete with remembrance and a sense of loss. Those thematic elements were reflected in an opening solo in which the dancer’s movements seemed laden with mournfulness, while the accompanying music—the gospel hymn, His Eye is on the Sparrow—evoked the coexistence of heart-wrenching loss with the possibility of transcending and surviving tragedy. In contrast, the four male dancers in the next section of Better Days depicted lives committed to the expression of an exuberant, celebratory lifestyle.

Here, I will risk speculating that gay members of the Jacob’s Pillow audience (and others who had intimate knowledge of gay culture) may have watched Better Days and understood the multiple meanings reflected in a theatrical performance that suggested the possibility of gay bars and dance clubs being sites that exist solely for the purpose of hedonistic pleasures. On the one hand, that image might have been seen as reinforcing stereotypes of gay existence as the epitome of a superficial and self-indulgent lifestyle; but, on the other hand, such expressions might have been perceived as a communal form of release, part of a healing process that helps ameliorate the stresses of living in an extremely homophobic society. Yet, there may have been others in the audience who did not maintain either of those points of view, and instead they simply enjoyed the spectacle of four amazingly-energized men dancing rhythmically and buoyantly, spinning in and out of movement vortices, and luxuriating in the euphoria of the moment.

In Better Days, Brown also continued to develop some of the choreographic devices he had begun to explore in the men’s duet in Dirt Road, including interjections of fleeting effeminate gestures and movement phrases that were infused with homoerotic innuendo. For example, there is a moment in the dance when the four men line up across the front of the stage with their backs to the audience; then—as if they have exposed their genitalia—they all glance down to “check out” each other. Their dancing also included brief, but suggestive, pelvis-to-buttocks contacts. Those moments flickered like signals, guiding the audience through the representation of a transgressive space where sexuality between men is not only permitted—it is celebrated. Yet, everything unfolded with good-natured joviality, and some members of the audience responded as if they were in on a naughty—but tolerable—little joke.

Moving the audience to a contrasting emotional pole, the third work of the concert, Water, opened with the unsettling spectacle of dancers flinging themselves violently at each other. They seem to be in the throes of some undisclosed trauma that has left their white clothing splattered with what appears to be blood. It is an image that has powerful emotional import; but, at the same time, it leads one to wonder what message the choreography is meant to convey. It is a question of creative intent that only the artist can answer. Fortunately, dance enthusiasts who visit the Pillow are given opportunities to gain insight into the creative processes of an individual artist.

During a PillowTalk with Maura Keefe on July 7, 1999, Brown described how he worked on the opening section of Water with his dancers. He tried to motivate them with the idea that they belonged to a family/community in which some of the members needed to convince others that they were making dire mistakes in their lives. To create the desired images of confrontation and intervention, he encouraged the dancers to literally jump on each other’s backs and wrestle each other to the ground. Brown explained that he called this “snatching”—the point being that sometimes you have to use tough love to “snatch” someone back to reality. ClosePillowTalk—Poetry in Movement—1999/07/07—DVD #1267, Jacob’s Pillow Archives. He alluded to the same idea in his interview with David Gere, when he discussed the conceptional underpinnings of Ebony Magazine. In that case, indulgently self-involved individuals needed to be “snatched” back to their senses. He also spoke of a similar situation with a family member, describing how he once had to throw his younger brother out of the house to teach him a lesson. CloseDavid Gere, PillowNotes—Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, 1999.

As Water unfolded, one group of dancers and then another moved to the back of the stage, where each dancer removed part of their clothing and appeared to try to wash away the red stains. It is a powerful opening for a work layered with deeply emotional images, and those shifting images were enhanced by the words of poet Cheryl Boyce-Taylor. From his early childhood Brown had always felt the need to express himself through his own poetic writings, and during a later period—1983 through 1985—he found a group of kindred spirits when he connected with a collective of gay poets that included Essex Hemphill, Donald Woods, Craig Harris, Colin Robinson, and “several other incredible writers.” CloseRonald K. Brown, 25^th Anniversary, p. 17.

During the creation of Water, Brown worked closely with Boyce-Taylor, as he wove her poetry into the piece. When they were interviewed at the Pillow, they discussed some of the ways they had engaged in a symbiotic creative process. Although he had worked with the integration of text and movement before—including dances in which he used his own poetry—Brown described how he had developed a new way of working during the creation of Water. He realized that Boyce-Taylor clearly wanted to be present in the studio while he choreographed, and this inspired him to work back and forth between her and the dancers:

“Cheryl was there, and I would make up the movement with Cheryl there . . . . And, I would have to go line by line and then go work it out with the dancers. And, then they would have to remember the material. And, I would have to rehearse them in the material; and then go back over to Cheryl and say, ‘o.k., can we go to the next line?’” So, it was kind of a tedious process, but that was the only way I could see to do this particular piece.” ClosePillowTalk—Poetry in Movement.

A type of dance-theater that created a unique sensory experience for the audience by melding movement with music and the spoken word.What resulted was a type of dance-theater that created a unique sensory experience for the audience by melding movement with music and the spoken word. In the coming years, several of his most important works would adhere to that aesthetic.

With the creation of Water, Brown continued to display a remarkable ability to synthesize a wide spectrum of historical and cultural material drawn from African-diasporan sources. Sometimes those sources were as near as his personal experiences as a black male living within a nurturing circle of family and friends. He often spoke of the ongoing influence that his family’s church affiliation exerted in his life: “I grew up in the church in Brooklyn. My great uncle founded a church, so it was there for us. You had to go. It was just the way to be connected to God. My grandmother and my mother always made your relationship with God a priority. . . . Even when I left home and didn’t attend church every Sunday, my relationship to God was very important to me.” CloseDavid Gere, PillowNotes, July 1999.

Guided by the influences of his early religious upbringing, Brown created works like Water that acknowledge the sanctity of many different types of spiritual practice: “I believe in God. And Jesus Christ was a prophet. Mohammed was a prophet. There are some incredible lessons in the Buddhist religion. I use whatever oracle and whatever lesson could assist my staying on track. I collect spiritual practices and exercise them as much as I can.” CloseIbid. Moreover, because he had continued to steep himself in the traditional music and dance forms that are an inextricable part of West Africa religions, he stretched the spiritual trajectory of his work from the specificity of individual black lives (like his grandmother’s), to African cosmologies, to universal truths.

In addition to the African-American music Brown used in High Life, the music of Nigerian artist Fela Anikulapo Kuti further exemplified the complexity of cultural transmission throughout the African diaspora. The PillowNotes in the program consisted of an insightful essay by Suzanne Carbonneau in which she discussed the circuitous routes that black music and dance have traveled over several centuries. In Fela’s ebulliently polyrhythmic music, one can hear African musical forms that migrated to America, where they evolved into African-American musical forms. Those, in turn, migrated back to Africa, where—in combination with other music of the diaspora, for example that of Cuba and Jamaica—they had a marked influence on artists like Fela: CloseSuzanne Carbonneau, PillowNotes—Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival—Doris Duke Studio Theatre—July 13 – 16, 2000, Ronald K. Brown Evidence, Jacob’s Pillow Archives.

In High Life, Brown traced this cross-pollination through the music of the late Nigerian musician, Fela Anikulapo Kuti (popularly known as Fela), who began his career in the ‘50s as a singer with a highlife band. By the ‘60s Fela had developed his own instantly identifiable sound, which he first called highlife-jazz, and eventually, Afro-beat. Melding highlife, soul, jazz, and traditional Nigerian music, Fela’s music became internationally recognized for its rhythms, while it inspired Nigerians with its heroic stand against political corruption and injustice. CloseIbid.

Carbonneau’s last statement refers to Fela’s important role as an artist whose social and political activism in the 1970s and 1980s led to vicious attacks on him and his family by the Nigerian military government; eventually he was imprisoned for almost two years. During his tumultuous life, he used every aspect of his artmaking to confront the various abuses of power—governmental, corporate, and religious—that he saw decimating the lives of black people around the world.

Upside Down and High Life were two works that encapsulated the highly expressive and dynamic approach to movement that Ron Brown had been refining during his career. A striking example of this is his exploration of the polycentric possibilities in a dancing body. An arm or a leg is impulsively flung/released in one direction and the rest of the dancer’s body seems to follow, only to be quickly re-directed when another part of the anatomy decides to take over. Likewise, the snap/toss of a head can send a dancer reeling in a new direction. This physical dynamic lends a mercurial quality to Brown’s movement vocabulary, because one is never quite sure where the next movement phrase will be initiated in the dancer’s body, where the unpredictable flow of physical energy will be resolved. I see this as a movement metaphor for a state of possession, the seemingly uncontrolled, trance-like state of a worshiper whose consciousness has been taken over by a spirit—a god. This idea is especially salient in regard to Brown’s body of work, because his choreography is so heavily influenced by African and African-diasporan cultures in which religious ecstasy is an expressive component of the people’s dance and music forms.

Another characteristic of Brown’s movement vocabulary is its exquisite gestural quality. In our daily lives, the use of our hands and arms, the shrug of our shoulders, and the tilt of our heads all vivify the deepest meanings of the words we use. Brown incorporates similar gestural communication in his choreography. A frequent viewer of his work becomes accustomed to seeing the gesture of a dancer with their arms extending diagonally downward to the side of their body, elbows slightly bent. The flattened palms of their hands are either facing forward or upward. It is a gestural question—Why did you? How soon will you? When can you? It is a way that he enables his dancers to speak with each other, in movement conversations that are central to many of his works.

However, it is not only the body’s appendages and extremities that make gestures in his dances. When I see a dancer with his or her head thrown back, fully exposing their neck, opening their chest, and arching their back, I see a bodily gesture. One that clearly delineates a spiritual state of supplication, or joy, or resignation, as in, “God I am in your hands.” Very often, Brown extends this particular bodily disposition into an explosive turn in the air, or he uses it as a static punctuation at the end of a movement phrase. For me, both of those options indicate the choreographer’s fascination with the dichotomy between movement that surges on as if it might never end, and sudden stillness that continues to pulse with the afterlife of the body’s previous animation. This, too, is full of metaphorical significance.

The juxtaposition of movement and stillness is, of course, an element of all dance. Sometimes when dancers are on stage, they dance; and at other times, they are still. But Brown’s use of this polarity strikes me as having a special place in his aesthetic. He has often described how his company’s name, Evidence, relates to our being in the world. We are all evidence of a constellation of things—our personal histories, our family heritage, our people’s strivings. Dancers in his works, then, represent the same fulsome meaning of individual existence. They dance their evidence. They dance as evidence. Quite often, they stop abruptly. They seem to stand at attention, waiting as a servant to be called to attend someone’s needs, or as a witness to be called to testify. In these static moments, they channel accountability as they observe each other’s danced evidence. Watching them watching each other is a mysterious and fulfilling experience.

Ronald K. Brown returned to the Pillow in 2002 to participate in A Tribute to Katherine Dunham. From June 24 to 27, the series of panels, master classes, workshops, and performances drew participants from throughout the U.S. and abroad to honor one of America’s most important artists who had dedicated her life to dance performance and scholarship, humanitarian efforts, and political and social activism. At the opening concert, Brown danced a solo, In Gratitude, for Ms. Dunham while she sat on stage. And his company performed an excerpt from Walking Out the Dark, Part II.

Overlapping with the Dunham activities, Evidence performed from June 26 to 30, in a program that reprised Upside Down and an excerpt from Water. The work that closed the program, Walking Out the Dark, brought many of Brown’s aesthetic signatures to the stage in heightened form. For example, the opening section consists of four dancers standing in a circle on a darkened stage. In their own turn, each moves into a barely-lit central area, where they converse with another member of the group in the gestural dance language I described earlier. They communicate with flurries of movement, as they confront, question, cajole and otherwise express a gamut of disturbing emotions. The music for the opening section—first Philip Hamilton’s and then Sweet Honey in the Rock’s—suggests the southern locale that Brown visited in Dirt Road, but, as if traveling to another location, the music eventually segues into the rhythmic percussion of Francisco Mora.

In the post-show talk, Brown discussed some of the background material that inspired Walking Out the Dark. He explained how, in 1996, he set out to write a book of poetry and essays that was based on an individual’s letters to his brother, his sister, and his mother. He also spoke of how the letter-writer (ostensibly Brown himself) realized that there was a disturbing distance in his relationships with his family members that placed him in a kind of exile. He sensed that there was a lack of mutual caring between them. “There’s some anger in the relationship, a need for forgiveness.” ClosePost-show Discussion—Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival—Ted Shawn Theatre—June 26 – 30, 2002—Ronald K. Brown/ Evidence — DVD #1475.2, Jacob’s Pillow Archives. Brown’s thoughtful reflections, again, underscored the centrality of familial themes in several of his works.

He also commented on the second section of Walking Out the Dark, which—in striking contrast to the first section—had a folkloric quality that was enhanced by the dancers’ colorful costumes. Brown recounted how he and his company had traveled to Cuba several months earlier, first teaching and working with several companies in Havana and then traveling to Santiago, where they worked with Ballet Folklorico Cutumba. He spoke of the rich experiences they shared with Cuban artists who were steeped in religious traditions wherein spirits manifest themselves in the dancing bodies of worshippers. His growing understanding of kindred spirits throughout the African diaspora reaffirmed his belief in the value of his work, and he explained that he felt a calling to connect the spiritual traditions of the people he encountered in different locations around the world. This was of special importance to him because of the lack of spiritual grounding he sensed in contemporary America. CloseIbid.

Ronald K. Brown’s artistic journey shows us the many ways that a dancing human body functions both as a representation of our flesh-and-blood material existence, and as a symbolic and spiritual representation that transcends our physical existence. The themes of his work reflect a constellation of human concerns—religious beliefs, social and political issues, conflicts over gender and sexuality, and other matters that we address in our daily lives. He brings all of those things together in work that is exquisitely seamless, profoundly communicative, and breathtaking in its multi-faceted beauty. Over the years, he and his company members have been able to share the abundance of their artistic gifts with audiences at Jacob’s Pillow, and that is yet another indication of the festival’s valuable contributions to the world of dance.

PUBLISHED july 2020