INNER VIEW: Dancer Ronald K. Brown
finds inspiration in Pittsburgher’s photos

Evidence, a Brooklyn-based dance company led by Artistic Director Ronald K. Brown, makes its Penn State debut in a performance featuring major excerpts of One Shot, a new work inspired by the images of prominent Pittsburgh photojournalist Charles “Teenie” Harris. The presentation, which also includes the shorter works Upside Down and Come Ye, is scheduled for 8 p.m. Saturday, December 1, in Eisenhower Auditorium.

Brown, who founded his company in 1985, draws on many muses—African American, African, Latin American, and Caribbean cultures plus modern, hip-hop, and ballet influences—to express his response to the human condition. Spoken words are a common characteristic in many of his dances. Brown choreographed and performs in each of the works on the program. 

“Brown’s choreography has zoomed to the forefront of modern dance by virtue of its exquisitely sculpted movement, and a compelling sense that the dancing springs from a deep well of spiritual urgency,” writes a Washington Post critic. “Though the idea of blending modern dance with African dance is as old as Katherine Dunham, Brown’s fusion of the two idioms is uniquely his own, and his work looks like no one else’s.”

One Shot is set to the music of Billy Strayhorn, Ahmad Jamal, Mary Lou Williams, Arturo Sandoval, Anonimo Consejo, and Mamadouba Mohammed Camara. The work focuses on themes such as community life, family, hope, dignity, and celebration common to the creations of both Harris and Brown. Photographs by Harris, who died in 1998, are integrated into the design of the dance.

In 2001, Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art acquired a collection of some 80,000 Harris images from the photographer’s estate. The museum, which is cataloging and digitizing the photos, plans a major Harris exhibition.

“Teenie Harris’ photographs are unsurpassed in the range of subjects they portray and for their ability to evoke the spirit of an era and to display the humanity of a people,” writes Larry Glasco, an associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. “Harris’ forty-year career with the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the largest and most influential Black newspapers in the country, began as the nation emerged from the Depression and ended with the Civil Rights Movement.”

Pittsburgh’s August Wilson Center for African American Culture asked Brown to choreograph a work about the city’s African American heritage. He started with the idea of doing something about the great musicians, such as Strayhorn, Phyllis Hyman, and George Benson, who came from Pittsburgh. But Brown’s attention eventually turned to Harris, whose nickname, “One Shot,” intrigued him.

“That was very exciting, just the metaphor of one shot,” says Brown, speaking by phone from Brooklyn. “What do you do with your one opportunity? And so then I started researching his work [and] realized I had many postcards. I had collected images over the years, and at one point had a wall in my apartment just of black-and-white photographs that kind of represented life, kind of gave me nourishment in a way. That was just the hook that I needed. Then as I worked on this—it’s been a couple of years now—I began to understand that the piece is really about legacy. When someone leaves a legacy, when they contribute to society, it gives the rest of us a capacity to dream. And that’s where we’ve gone with the piece.”

The evening-length version of One Shot, which is about ninety minutes long, had its world premiere in September. A twelve-minute introductory section debuted a couple of years ago. The excerpt being performed at Penn State is about fifty-five minutes in length.

“When we come to somewhere new,” Brown says, “I think our choice is to share a range of work [because] maybe an audience that doesn’t know Evidence might not be ready for an evening-length piece.”

The production incorporates Harris images. “In One Shot we will have a photo integration, because I want the audience to get it without them being spoon-fed,” he says. “I want to use different elements that will help put the dance in context.”

In addition to One Shot, the program includes two earlier dances created by Brown.

Upside Down, set to music by Oumou Sangare and Fela Kuti, is an excerpt from Destiny, an evening-length work created in collaboration with Rokiya Kone and her company Jeune Ballet d’Afrique Noire of Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast).

“Upside Down is from a larger piece I made in 1998 after three years of going back and forth to Côte d’Ivoire, again teaching theatre, dance companies. In this one section, upside down is a phrase that means kind of chaos, my life is upside down, and usually because there’s some kind of corruption or things just not being balanced,” Brown says.

“So while we’re working on this section [called ‘Premonition’], we keep lifting up this one dancer in the company. I’m carrying him, the women are carrying him, the group is carrying him across the stage. You know, what is this, I don’t understand?” he remembers thinking. “So maybe two weeks before we go into Côte d’Ivoire, I get a phone call that one of the dancers who was going to be in the piece, Alphonse, makes the transition. He passes away, and he was 26. He was the third person in those three years when I was going back there that had made a transition—young people. And I said, oh shucks, that’s what this premonition is, because in the piece the idea is you feel lost and what brings us together, unfortunately or fortunately, is often a tragedy. It kind of brings the collective together. And so that’s what Upside Down is about—the premonition of the collective or something is going to happen.” 

Come Ye, a call to prayer and action, is danced to the music of Nina Simone and Fela Anikulapo Kuti. Come Ye includes a film collage by Robert Penn.

Some people mistakenly think Come Ye, which premiered in 2003, is about the events of September 11, 2001, but Brown says it’s actually a reaction to what came next. When American military troops were sent to Afghanistan in autumn 2001, Brown says he struggled with his feelings about the decision.

“I was listening to [music], you know I was cleaning the house, and I knew I had a Nina Simone piece in me but assumed that it would be around some of her civil rights protest songs,” he recalls. “But I also felt like I had dealt with that before. And so I thought, okay, at some point the Nina Simone piece would come. And this song comes on, ‘Come Ye,’ and she says, basically, it’s time for us to learn how to pray. Anyone who wants to fight for their life, it’s time for us to learn how to pray. Kind of round up everyone. And I said, oh my goodness, that’s how I feel.”

“In the last three minutes of the piece there’s actually a short film that we dance with that is called The Revolutionaries,” he points out. “We kind of looked at all the revolutionaries throughout our history—Gandhi, Dr. King is there, people going to rally marches everywhere—and it’s quick but in the piece we are at this point kind of congregating, becoming in line—in line and aligned—with these images of people who were about, really, creative protest.”

Jazz singer Nnenna Freelon, who has performed with Evidence, has nothing but praise for Brown.

“He takes modern dance, with African dance influence and ballet influence, and somehow mixes it all together in some kind of incredibly sophisticated and wonderful way, and just tells stories with the body,” Freelon says.

“He’s an amazing,  amazing choreographer and human being. My experience with him doing Blueprint of a Lady: The Once and Future Life of Billie Holiday was just a life-changing experience for me,” she says. “He took the music from my Blueprint album and choreographed, with eight dancers, beautiful, beautiful dance—actually brought the words and the music to life in a very physical way.”

Freelon most recently performed the work with Brown and Evidence November 10 at New York City’s Apollo Theater. “I was on stage with him, as was the band,” she says. “He actually had me dancing, if you can believe that.”

Much of his work, Brown says, is a reaction against the all-too-common belief that dancers need to be detached from the audience. His dancers, he counters, are storytellers who must connect emotionally with people.

“I tell the dancers that the audience can only witness what we’re feeling. They don’t know what we’re thinking,” he says. “They have to be able to witness and feel what we’re feeling.”

Instead of the customary pre-performance Artistic Viewpoints, the Evidence presentation will be followed by a talk among the company members and the audience.