Ron Brown, Brooklyn NY, cont.

3/7

AP: You see your existence as a Black man in the Over-the-Rhine (note 2) neighborhood?

RB: Yes, it’s deep because there are so many images, in my work, of being bound or handcuffed or being thrown against a car, but only as images. That’s what my work is about. So last night when we did it on stage, simply as artists trying to get closer, because as an artist I’m trying to get to the work I’m supposed to do, it has a whole other resonance here [in Cincinnati].

AP: I can imagine, especially when we are in a city with race issues, that all of a sudden the work isn’t just images. The work looks like life in so many of these communities in turmoil.

RB: Yes. Last night one of the brothers in the company ended up asking a member of the audience, “So, what is the situation like here?” And this sister responded, “Well, what is it like in New York?” When we talk about it, I want to be clear that it’s really about our work, what we see, how we step to it and how we respond to life circumstances. It’s not, necessarily, how other people respond to us. One sister in the audience said, “I just want you to know that if you ever worried about it, I got it.”

AP: What is the influence on your work of dances you see in the theater compared to non-theatrical movement you see in other environments?

RB: All of it is up for grabs—social dance, traditional dance from Cuba, from West Africa. I feel like that’s my assignment, my job, to connect all of those dances and to present how they are connected on a spiritual level.

AP: What about the dance on stage, ballet for example?

RB: All forms and techniques are used in order to help you see. There’s definitely something theatrical in my work, so we have acting assignments in order to express ourselves through roles. But the technique from theater is simply another tool associated with craftsmanship, a means to tell the story, the same way a writer has to get his craft down if he wants people to understand his words.

AP: Do other art forms influence your work, and how?

RB: We’re currently doing High Life (note 3), a work about migration and the spirit that lives in folks who have to pick up, in search of a better life. And I know the piece came out of my seeing the Jacob Lawrence exhibit back in ’96, the Migration Series (note 4)—just walking the hallways, you know, just standing in front of the work and asking myself, “How did he unearth this stuff?” Then those images connected with other images from a film that I saw of a brother in Senegal who got on a bike with one suit and some sunglasses--going to the city. All of a sudden, those images connect with Langston Hughes (note 5) and Jess B Simple (note 6) and that brother who had one suit, in Harlem, trying to chill. So the images—my sources for movement—come from all different genres of art. Then it’s a matter of my being obedient…listening. “Where do these images belong?” That’s how they find their way into the work. The same thing happens with poetry.

AP: So poetry, music, visual art. Are there any other influences?

RB: Photography. Photography is able to capture the singular visual moment and evoke your own visual response.