Photo by Christopher Duggan
If the name of choreographer Camille A. Brown doesn’t sound familiar, you might know her work. Recently, she worked on Broadway’s “Once on This Island” (2017) and NBC’s “Jesus Christ Superstar,” last year’s live televised concert featuring musician John Legend as Jesus. On Sept. 27, she’s coming to the University of Richmond’s Modlin Center for the Arts with her dance company to perform parts of a trilogy of her works about African American identity.
“I guess I call this show a sampling because it has a little bit of everything,” she says. The show will offer highlights from “Mr. TOL E. RAncE,” “BLACK GIRL: Linguistic Play” and “ink,” as well as “New Second Line,” which celebrates the people of New Orleans.
Brown was last in Richmond five years ago, when her company presented “Mr. TOL E. RAncE” at the Grace Street Theater. The evening-length work examines and celebrates African American humor, the mask of survival and stereotypes of black culture throughout history. Revisiting those themes in today’s political climate is something she’s looking forward to doing.
“It will be exciting for the audiences who’ve seen ‘Mr. TOL E. RAncE’ to see it again. It’s a different time now,” she says. “When I first started doing ‘TOL E. RAncE’ and working on it, people still had the mindset of, like, post-racial society, and, you know, I think that’s a very hard argument to still have today. So I think it will be interesting to see how people respond to something now that we’re in a different time, and what does that do to your perception?”
Brown, an energetic and youthful 39-year-old from Jamaica, a neighborhood in Queens, New York, discovered dance at the age of 3 and studied with Bryan Hawthorne at the DeVore Dance Center. Hawthorne, she says, taught her more than just dance. “He taught us about the world, life, living experiences.”
Brown graduated from New York City’s Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts and earned a bachelor’s in fine arts from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. Brown’s work is designed to “see beyond dance.” She wants people to “see stories they can relate to.” Those familiar with the urgency of Urban Bush Women or the musicality of groundbreaking choreographer Dianne McIntyre may feel the impact of their inspiration. But Brown is not a carbon copy.
“I’m not doing choreography 2.0,” she says. “I’m lifting up the black experience.”
She’s also creating dance for musicals, including the Tony-winning “Once,” in which the entire cast acts, sings, dances and plays musical instruments, and the upcoming “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” an adaptation of August Wilson’s award-winning play that is being produced for Netflix by Denzel Washington. The cast includes Viola Davis, Chadwick Boseman and Glynn Turman. Concurrently, Brown is preparing a work for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and “Porgy and Bess” for the Metropolitan Opera.
“It’s very exciting, and I’m just trying to make sure that I do a good job in every project that I’m connected to because everything is really important,” she says.
Camille A. Brown & Dancers perform at the University of Richmond’s Alice Jepson Theatre, part of the Modlin Center for the Arts, at 7:30 p.m on Friday, Sept. 27. $20 to $40.
