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DANCE | Ronald K. Brown/Evidence: A Dance Retrospective

Fri Sep 22nd 7:00pm – Sun 24th 5:00pm

     Ronald K. Brown: The Body of Evidence

While attending P.S. 3 in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Ronald K. Brown saw an Alvin Ailey dance concert where as a youngster he discovered that a dance could be made with a chair.

He was entranced.

Several years later, Brown, 19 — who also studied creative writing and journalism in junior high (35) high school and college– formed his Ronald K. Brown/Evidence Dance Company.

There were some bumps in the road to that point but Brown high-stepped them, encouraged by instruction from important fans, including Arthur Mitchell, Bessie Schoenberg, Audre Lorde and others.

The pivot from a possible journalism career to his beloved dancing started with a scholarship to the Mary Anthony Dance Studio on the Lower East side. But, he admits his influences came long before then building from his ancestral family roots, including an array of strong, hearty hardworking landowner and entrepreneurial ancestral grands, greats and great grands- parents.

In an interview with Our Time Press, he talked about the mentors in his life, and how he is happy to be have an artistic home at Billie Holiday Theatre.

This weekend, RestorationART presents Ronald K. Brown/Evidence, the renowned dance company that has made Bed-Stuy its artistic home, will perform for the very first time in The Billie Holiday Theatre with a retrospective concernt of revolution and memory. Join us for a conversation on opening night between two dance greats – Ronald K. Brown and Judith Jamison.

Fri, Sep 22 at 7PM | Opening Night Concert, includes Conversation and Reception: $50

Fri, Sep 22 at 7PM Includes Only Opening Night Concert and Conversation: $35

Sat, Sep 23 at 7PM and Sun, Sep 24 at 3PM | $25

Ronald K. Brown/Evidence: A Retrospective Concert

Opening Night Concert and Conversation, followed by a post-concert reception

Fri, Sep 22, 2017 from 7PM – 9 PM

Friday night, a conversation with Ronald K. Brown and Judith Jamison – explores the legacy of choreographic work shaped by the Civil Rights Movement to the work being created now in the era of Black Lives Matter. This conversation is followed by an evening-length dance concert by the Ronald K. Brown/Evidence Dance Company. Evidence will present excerpts from High Life, inspired by the work of Jacob Lawrence’s The Great Migration, as well as Jesse B. Semple. Tickets are available at RestorationART.org.

He credits relatives, like Aunt May and Aunt Maggie, who gave giving him the inspiration, and a long list of grand begetters with giving him the genes of creativity, expression and self-sustenance.

Brown told us how he incorporates nearly every experience he’s every had – whether from a mountain top in a foreign country where monks lived to the Sumner (now Marcus Garvey) streets where he played or the backwoods of North Carolina where he spent summers, and Cuba, Liberia, Senegal, Ghana, Ivory Coast, the places where he found the universal “human condition” which connect us all.

This evening of inspired words and movement the dance gods and goddesses are likely to be present in the theatre.

Hopefully, there will be time for Mr. Brown and Ms. Jamison to discuss their respective dance mentors of whom Mr. Brown spoke highly.

Schoenberg told him to “speak up” and to “do what you intend to do” and “always make sure people understand where you come from.”     Mitchell encouraged him to maintain fluency in adapting traditional African dance movement, but also to learn “ballet idiom.”

In addition to Ailey and Jamison, Brown is inspired by the work of Dianne McIntyre and Katherine Dunham — all storytellers. Mr. Brown, himself, is working on a collection of essays, short stories and poetry.

In the 1990’s, Mr. Brown visited a convent on a high mountain and lived a few days in one of their cells. The small window allowed him to see sky and observe the village dance festivals far below. He said he connected to a spirit, perhaps the same one he already knew so to speak.

When Mr. Brown visited Ms. Dunham in New York City, before she passed, he told her, “I can dream and do this thing I’m doing because of you.”

She replied, “I don’t know what’s wrong with some of you young people, today. Please don’t let us down.”

Mr. Brown responded, “Miss Dunham, I’m trying not to.”

Mr. Brown, not only dances, creates dances and encourages the community to dance, he also mentors and teaches dance to would-be, emerging and established dancers ranging from six to 79. He told us, “The responsibility of the artist is to tell the truth. I am clear with all my dances and my dancing. What I feel is what you are witnessing.”

He also said once, “What you are and what you think is a product of all the things that have gone into you; the things that are from your culture and your roots as well as the stuff from the outside. You are evidence of all that information.”   And so, too, is Mr. Brown.

The Skylight Gallery at Restoration Plaza held a gathering of authors, editors, agents and regular literary-minded folks for a conversation between Bed-Stuy native, author and MIT Professor Craig Wilder and author Herb Boyd about Boyd’s 25^th book, “Black Detroit: A People’s History of Self-Determination”, now on the New York Times’ Recommended Reading list.

Wilder began by looking for the inspiration for the book, because when reading the introduction, which he confessed he usually does not do, it seemed to be the telling of “a very personal story” wherein Boyd recounts his journey as a 4-year-old holding his mother’s hand as they left the peanut farm of Alabama and rode the train to the factory life of the city.

His mother had left the South in 1941 at the beginning of WWII and before the 1943 riots. They arrived in Detroit “making the voyage from peanut farm and cotton patch, away from the boll weevil and the Ku Klux Klan, moving away from the menace and demons in the South” to a place where Henry Ford was offering $5.00 a day and that proved to have a “magnetism” that drew on Black folks who had heard the stories, bringing them North to join others who had made the journey.

His mother had done two reconnaissance trips to get the lay of the land before she brought the family and then they “bounced around the city” while his mother worked in the factories of WWII, and when the war ended the factories closed and the men came marching home, she worked as a domestic worker for families in the suburbs. Boyd says it was “the kind of common struggle of self-preservation that was similar across the country”.

Wilder noted that the movement of the Boyd’s around Detroit “was about more than just changing apartments”. It reflected “a changing economy and an unstable economy for African-Americans after the war”.

He said, “You’re telling a very personal story about family”, that is as much Boyd’s mother’s story as his. “I think there is something important when Black scholars think about their own families in transformative ways” and he asked how those connections motivated this project. “My personal odyssey is inseparable from this book,” Boyd agreed. “Recounting, recalling and remembering all of the things I learned in Detroit.”

Among the things he learned was how his life in Detroit was reflected in neighborhoods in other urban areas. “I feel the African-American experience [in Detroit] is emblematic of the African-American experience in the whole country”, and that includes slavery and the Underground Railroad. “A lot of people don’t know that slavery was in Detroit and the city had a strong abolitionist movement as part of the web of pathways and byways away from captivity and passage to Canada.”

A lot of history was covered in the conversation, the slave revolts of Nat Turner and Gabriel Prosser, remembering the names of Shields Green and Dangerfield Newby, two of the Black freedom fighters who were tried and hanged because the rode with John Brown in the 1859 raid on the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry.

Wilder said that “as a historian” he was glad to see that the period Boyd covered began in the 1700’s with the Black interactions with native peoples and French traders.

For his deeply-researched book, Boyd had found Black people in those earliest years and Wilder said that telling of them made that history, “an extraordinarily international story with Black people playing a central role” that they are often denied. “We like to start Black history when it’s convenient for other people,” he said. And speaking of other people, Wilder asked about the “choice you make without saying it. It follows Black people–not much about white people in the book. What does that tell us about the story you tell?”

“Our history has to be told,” Boyd said, and the perspectives of Black people are needed. “Our history has to be protected, preserved and then passed on to the next generation. We have that responsibility.”

Boyd has created a lot of history himself with over 30 years at Harlem’s venerable Amsterdam News, but he finds that it conflicts with the time and concentration required as a journalist the time he needs as an author “to reflect and write the books”. he thanked his editorial team, including his wife and his longtime agent Marie Brown For their support, for allowing him into their lives and for giving him the time and guidance he needed for writing this “Part-memoir, part-autobiography, part-biography. My love letter to Detroit: “Some say you can’t go home again, but that ain’t true.”

Herb Boyd went back home and returned with a 300-year history of Detroit as told through the eyes and the lives of Black people. All in attendance for the conversation were glad he made the journey.

(The event was hosted by the Honorable Annette Robinson and Bainbridge Harrison Partners)