Sat 11/14 @ 8PM
This coming Saturday evening we’re going to the Hanna Theatre at PlayhouseSquare to see Camille A. Brown & Dancers. The dance, Black Girl: Linguistic Play, only recently premiered in NYC – to excellent reviews – but Cleveland dance audiences already saw it as a work in progress. LAST JANUARY!
In a world of media stereotypes, Black Girl: Linguistic Play takes us back to the playground where we see elements of social dancing, double Dutch, steppin’, tap, Juba, ring shout, and gesture, the formative stuff of African-American girls. It turns out that Miss Mary Mack Mack Mack all dressed in black black black explains a lot.
Keeping Cleveland in the front seat and a step ahead of what’s newest and best in concert dance is Pam Young, executive director of DANCECleveland since 2003. But how exactly does Young do it? We phoned Young and followed her down the winding road between a gleam in Camille A. Brown’s eye and the completed Black Girl: Linguistic Play.
CoolCleveland: What is Black Girl: Linguistic Play and why do we need this piece?
Pam Young: It really goes back to our commissioning of this work. When you commission a work, you never know what you’re going to get. But what you’re doing is supporting the creative process, supporting a young dance maker.
The piece she [Camille A. Brown] was touring a few years ago, Mr. Tol E. Rance, was based on the way African-Americans were depicted during the early days of television and in the movies of that time. The roles African-Americans were given, the tap dancing, the whole genre. The way Mr. Tol E. Rance dealt with those depictions was in-your-face but quite powerful. It includes, for instance, a solo that Camille does to Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World, a song which, despite its optimistic surface, has melancholy undertones, and she captured that so beautifully.
CC: Mr. Tol E. Rance won the 2014 Bessie Award for outstanding production.
PY: At the time her name was starting to come out but not in a huge way, so I was looking for an opportunity to support her. Then, lo and behold, the opportunity to apply for the Joyce Award came. It’s a several-step process. There’s a letter and a full-blown proposal. And they only award one in dance out of maybe 10 proposals so it’s a lot of work with little chance of success. So when she won I was surprised and so excited for her.
At first Camille said the piece had something to do with Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass and The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison and she wanted to do some research so I said, “If we’re going to write this grant we want to go on this journey with you.” At this point we were doing feasibility studies for a national center for choreography…
CC: We wondered if the new national center would play a part in this.
PY: We did have some time when she was working here, but for a choreographer working early on, it’s sometimes about doing research rather than being in the studio. So she came here and was here for a week. At first we thought she would want to work with Toni Morrison scholars but what she said was, “What I really want to do is talk to African-American women who are 60 or older, elders and their mothers.” So we tracked down six sets of elders and their mothers and she talked with them and then she said she’d like to talk with women who were incarcerated. So you can imagine what the phone call must have been like when we phoned the Northeast Reintegration Center, a women’s prison on East 30th Street, and got the warden on the phone. “We have a dance maker who would like to come and talk to some of your inmates.” “Who? What?” but the more we talked about it the more interested he became.
CC: To the prison! [Like much of modern dance, social program is a part of Black Girl: Linguistic Play. Learn about Spectrum.]
PY: You have to leave all your belongings in your car; you can’t have a phone or a purse; you have to go through check points to get in. But Camille went in and got these women dancing and she started talking about her work and these women were so encouraging to her. We videotaped all of the material she got from the interviews and the stories that she heard and she took all of that back and shared it with her dancers and began to form this work.
CC: Then we go to the new National Center for Choreography at Akron U, right?
PY: We were going to bring her back to spend time with her company here in a dance studio but quite frankly by the time you fly all of the company here and pay for their hotel and their per diem, it’s a lot of money.
CC: That’s interesting. We thought that the cost of renting theater and studio space in New York would make Cleveland relatively attractive but they didn’t actually rehearse here.
PY: No. We actually just sent them the funding for the rehearsal time so they went back to New York and they used it there and then we brought the company here in January for the International Association of Blacks in Dance Conference.
CC: Which performance we saw, by the way.
PY: You will not recognize the piece you are going to see as compared with the piece you saw last January. Dance makers go through a creative process and the work of art changes based on what the artist learns. In the case of Black Girl: Linguistic Play, Camille did works-in-progress showings and got feedback after IABD and at a couple of other sites. At IABD, for example, we gave a reception and she was able to talk with the women she interviewed originally and with other women. Then she worked with dramaturgs, sharpened the work, and edited, edited, edited until what you’ll see at the Hanna on Saturday is a much tighter, more cohesive piece.
CC: We are great believers in the power of editing but we didn’t have a bad experience watching Black Girl: Linguistic Play at IABD. What we saw was true to her announced intentions.
PY: If people saw it at IABD, they should come back to get a sense of the trajectory of the creative process from work in progress to the finished piece, which is so wonderful.
CC: Duly noted. And we already know that the showing of the work in progress here in January was not to be confused with the premiere.
PY: Right. During all of this we thought we’d have the premiere here but we got a call from Camille and she said that the Joyce Theatre in New York (No connection with the Joyce Award, which is based in Chicago.) would give her a full week of rehearsal on the stage.
CC: To prepare the piece, especially lighting design! What a deal!
PY: Yes, a week on stage if they could have the premiere, so I said “Absolutely, we do not have to have the premiere here,” because I could only give her about three days on the stage. That was all I could afford. So they did have the premiere at the Joyce and the reviews were very positive.
CC: As you’ve explained to us before, premieres tend to be very expensive. We shudder to think what a week of rehearsals would have cost, even in a relatively small theater like the Joyce.
PY: Premieres are often very ragged affairs. It typically takes three or four performances before a new work is polished. For us, I’d rather show a more polished, finished piece.
See the VIDEO and get a taste of the original music that will be performed live at the Hanna.
Camille A. Brown & Dancers perform Sat 11/14 @ 8PM at the Hanna Theatre. For tickets starting at $15 go to DANCECleveland.org or phone 216-241-6000.
Camille A. Brown & Dancers will do an advanced contemporary master class for ages 15 and up Fri 11/13 @ 5-6:30pm, and an intermediate contemporary master class for dancers 9-14m ALSO Fri 11/13 @5-6:3PM. Both classes are at Cleveland State University’s Middough Building Dance Studios, 5th Floor. RSVP required; email Sarah@dancecleveland.org.
[Written by Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas]