VIDEO: Preview Camille A. Brown And Dancers Returning To Joyce This February

Camille A. Brown's INK returns to Joyce February 5th through 10th 2019! Check out a video preview of the production below!

Propelled by the live rhythms and sounds of traditional African and handmade instruments, Camille A. Brown's ink celebrates the rituals, gestures, and traditions of the African diaspora. Highlighting themes of brotherhood, community and resilience, the work seeks to reclaim African American narratives, and is the final installment of Brown's dance theater trilogy about identity.

Performed by Camille A. Brown & Dancers, ink, co-commissioned by Peak Performances and developed in part through a residency at the Alexander Kasser Theater, is the final installation in Brown's dance trilogy about culture, race, and identity, which began with 2012's Mr. TOL E. RAncE and continued in2015 with BLACK GIRL: Linguistic Play.

Celebrating the rituals, gestural vocabulary, and tradition of the African diaspora, ink reclaims the narratives of African Americans through self-empowerment, Black love, brotherhood, exhaustion and resilience, community and fellowship. It depicts the pedestrian interactions of individuals and relationships as grounds for accessing one's innate super powers and finding liberation. The musical landscape embodies its own storytelling by mixing the percussive sounds of traditional African music with blues, hip-hop, jazz, and swing, and choreography drawn from an amalgam of modern, hip-hop, ballet, tap, and African-American social dance aesthetics.

In ink, Brown, whose choreography is currently on display on Broadway in the revival of Once on This Island, applies her spirited, playful, and incisive style to capturing gesture as it is informed by the varied cultures and movements emerging from African diasporic experiences. Brown spent over a year working with performers to devise the piece, giving herself the time to develop a keen understanding of the gestural individuality of everyone in her company, exploring their range of cultural histories and dance trainings. In the new work, these gestures, ranging from theatrical to everyday, display the coded language that carries the essence of African Diasporic mythologies, folklore, tall tales, and rituals.

For tickers and more visit https://joyce.org/performances/camille-brown-dancers