Bodies of Evidence

Inspired by the historic photographs of 'Teenie' Harris, the latest show from Ronald K Brown's dance company, which comes to Dublin Dance Festival next week, draws on a deep connection with stories of the African-American experience, he tells BELINDA McKEON

A WOMAN AND her 12-year-old son are on a mission. The boy is a dancer; he doesn’t know it yet, but the mother has known it for years. She has watched him dance alone in their apartment, to every note of music coming from the radio and the television. She has watched him hover at doorways during dance classes at his school, wanting to take part but holding back for fear of being the only boy in the room. She has watched him staring, transfixed, at older dancers, and has watched him come home, aged eight, from an Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater showcase and choreograph a dance, by himself, in the kitchen with a chair. Now, four years later, she has finally persuaded him to take the plunge and audition for a role at the Dance Theatre of Harlem.

“And we got to the door of our apartment, on our way there, and she went into labour with my little brother,” Ronald K Brown says. “And I said, aw, forget it. I need to be a big brother now. Forget it.”

But his mother didn’t forget it; nor did she let him use his new status as older brother to escape the dancer she knew he wanted to become. A couple of summers later, when Brown announced that he wanted to postpone his college degree and instead study at a Manhattan dance studio, his mother said simply: “I told you so.” Get a job, she told him, and spend the rest of the time learning to dance.

He found a job on Wall Street, processing cheques from midnight until 7am in JP Morgan, “then danced all day, then back to the office, and took a nap under a table somewhere. And when I was 19 I started my company.”

Brown's Brooklyn-based company, Evidence, will turn 25 next year, and by then Brown will have created close to 50 works for himself and his fellow dancers. From the beginning, the energy of Brown's choreography has come from its deep connection to the histories, both private and public, of African-American experience. This connection is borne out in the stories which have driven works such as Dirt Road(1994), Destiny(1998) and Come Ye(2003). The latter piece, which was created largely in tribute to Nina Simone, epitomises Brown's approach, weaving poems, letters and historical texts – a mixture of the found and the foundational – through the songs of Simone and the scenes of civil rights demonstrations which recur often in Brown's pieces.

And always in there are the movements and rhythms of traditional African dance. It’s for the ways in which he has re-imagined these traditional forms through contemporary vocabularies, and for the spiritual charge that this fusion has given to his work, that Brown is most acclaimed, not just as a choreographer but as a community leader of sorts. Each year, in dozens of communities both in the US and further afield, Brown leads workshops and demonstrations, which set out from his dance pieces but which quickly gain a momentum all their own, encouraging local communities to uncover and to talk about the legacies and traditions which underlie daily life – stories from their parents, their grandparents, stories of family suffering, of war, of immigration, of survival. He knows it’s old-fashioned to put this emphasis on the importance of legacy, but, says Brown, his aim with Evidence has always been “to lift up the past in praise of today”.

“We’re not brand-new,” he says. “I mean, we have cellphones and iPods and computers and all this technology, but we’re not brand-new. And so, the traditional values, old-fashioned values, are really what allow us to thrive. It’s when we think that it’s only about us that people start to starve, spiritually, or treat each other poorly.”

BROWN'S LATESTlarge-scale project, One Shot,which comes to the Abbey Theatre as part of the Dublin Dance Festival next week, is his fullest realisation yet of this notion of legacy and of the importance of bearing witness and of carrying old stories through to the present and future. An evening-length dance in seven sections, the piece is inspired by the photographer, Charles "Teenie" Harris, who was on the staff at the Pittsburgh Courierfrom 1936 to 1975, during which time he documented the African-American experience with beauty and frankness. He took his Rolleicord and his Crown Graphic cameras into churches, kitchens, factories, restaurants and music halls, on to streets, dancefloors and sporting fields. Nicknamed "One Shot" because that one shot was all he needed and all he took, Teenie Harris documented moments both ordinary and extraordinary, scenes both intimate and iconic.

Pittsburgh in the middle of the 20th century was a starkly segregated city, and Harris’s photographs capture both the pride and the tension surging through African-American communities in the Hill District as the struggle for rights intensified. In his portfolio were images of the protest marches and the political rallies, of infants and of grandparents, of Friday-night gatherings and of funeral processions, of barber shops and baseball games. And of pastors declaiming, and children playing, and coalminers labouring, and young men and women dressed up to the nines.

One Shotis a tribute to Harris, who died in 1998, but it is also a riff and a meditation on his images, integrating 31 photographs from Carnegie Museum's Teenie Harris collection by projecting them behind the dancers during the 90-minute performance. From this clutch of images, says Brown, the seven sections of the dance presented themselves to him naturally, organically.

Some images spoke to him more forcefully than others. There were photographs from funerals, showing caskets of different sizes, and mourners carrying flowers towards graves. There was a photograph of two children dressed in wedding garb, the little girl solemn as she held a single calla lily, the little boy looking mortified in his satin tuxedo, his face screwed up tight.

And there was another photograph of a young boy, a boxer this time, his gloves bigger than his head, his face streaked with tears. Out of the rawness and poignancy of the images, the emotional core of One Shotemerged, but out of the shapes and forms in the photographs, the movement and architecture of Brown's choreography was forged. It's a quiet, almost reverent work, the dancers turning toward and leaning into the images as though for sustenance.

As ever in Brown’s work, the dances themselves are a blend of ballet, of African and contemporary forms. Having a wealth of traditional forms on which to draw has been invaluable to him, he says, but he also admits that it took some time for him to accept that those forms were there for him to borrow and to use. He felt shy of them for a long time, worried that his interest would be seen as an appropriation.

“When I first started the company in 1985, I did not want to bastardise traditional dance,” he says. “I wouldn’t touch it at all. Then in the early 1990s I was teaching at a school where they taught dances from across the diaspora. And so I thought, I can deconstruct, or play with rhythms, but I’m not going to do any steps.”

It was a period of teaching in the Côte d’Ivoire which freed Brown up completely to claim a whole world of dances as his own.

“I saw that there was no need to be that precious,” he says. “People took me to social clubs, to villages, introduced me to everything from social to traditional to contemporary dance. And they said to me, I don’t know why African-Amerians want to call it African dance when they do it. Because as soon as they do it, it’s different. They encouraged me, that what I was doing was fine, that it was not what they were doing. I was using more steps or whatever, but that was okay.”

TECHNICALLY, HOWEVER,he does try to remain as pure to the original source of a traditional dance as possible.

“Purist in terms of technique,” he explains. “So a Congolese dance has a technique, dances from Ghana have a technique. Sabar, the Senegalese dance, has a technique. So I can use the technique, I can use the step, but I might use a different piece of music, not the traditional music.”

The music in One Shotincludes the jazz piano of Billy Strayhorn and Ahmad Jamal and the love songs of Lena Horne, while Cuban rap also features in the mix.

Brown has watched young Senagelese men perform the traditional Sabar dance with obvious hip-hop inflections, and he has seen similar evolutions, as he describes them, in other traditional forms. But what he seems most interested in is how the traditional forms allow modern forms not just to evolve but to deepen, to gain new power, how the influence flows both ways.

“Why should I have to pretend, to make up something in modern dance,” he says, “when I can use something, some movement that’s already got an intention to it, and embody it in this other story?”

His mother, who died in 1996 – his way of describing this is to say that she “made her transition” – could only approve of this opening up to existing rhythms, existing gestures, existing wisdom.

“She would say, ‘I’m your biggest fan, but you’re not the only one who can choreograph’,” he recalls.

He nods, as though hearing her words again. “Yeah.”

One Shot

is at the Abbey Theatre at 7.30pm on Tue, May 12, and Wed, May 13, as part of the Dublin Dance Festival, which runs from tomorrow until Sat, May 23. Tickets €30/€22; www.dublindancefestival.ie