Ron Brown, Brooklyn NY Interview by Arnecia Patterson

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“If you don’t know your culture or if you are closed off from other cultures then you can’t really bring anything to the table.”
–Ron Brown, dancer and choreographer, Evidence Dance Company

During the week of 9 April 2001, Black residents of Cincinnati, OH blew their cool and made national news following ‘race riots’ in protest of the police killing an unarmed Black, male suspect during pursuit. While the insurgence was relatively contained, the incident resulted in a lawsuit filed against the city by Black activists and the ACLU, a boycott of the city by Black entertainers who cancelled performances, and prompted a US Department of Justice investigation of Cincinnati police practices. The DOJ announced a tentative settlement on 12 April 2002.

A week later Ron Brown’s dance company, Evidence, arrived in town to perform at the Aronoff Center for the Performing Arts in downtown Cincinnati. Traditional West African movement, club poses, walking and gliding with arms flying, flailing, embracing, nurturing, earthbound, jubilant: the vivid and explicitly canted slave auction in Oscar Brown Jr’s (note 1) Bid 'Em In. Cincinnati residents, who had lived with fresh images of angry, racial confrontation in their ears, eyes and hearts for the last year, were not spared a deeply emotional presentation of Brown’s transcendent choreography. Surely, professional dancers in the audience, who had danced Brown’s work in the past, and students, who had taken his classes, would respond vicariously to the trenchant movement—its complexity, simplicity, its genesis, its meaning. However, that was not to be the case. According to Brown, there were virtually no questions about the work during the scheduled discussion following the show. Nor were there any informative responses to Evidence’s query to city residents regarding their feelings, living in a town barely separated (by the Ohio River) from the southern USA which seems to have spilled its xenophobic legacy across the rolling hills of this northern gateway city.

The audience’s lack of response raises its own question—one that has been touched on by Brown and two of the other choreographers in this series of interviews, Rennie Harris and Kevin Ward. Has the theatre’s exclusivity--insularity, repetitiveness, predictability and related code of deportment—dulled people’s capacity to respond to performances? During our discussion Ron joked, more than once, about walking away from dance to “open a fruit stand or health food store.” The lightly offered comment is a reminder of the risks in the phenomenology of concert dance when the soulful performer vacillates between character and truth; between the sanctified, acutely intimate “zone” where movement vehemently drives them both.