Camille A. Brown & Dancers
At Ted Shawn Theatre: Jul 31 - Aug 4
Event Dates
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About
Camille A. Brown & Dancers
This performance took place on July 31-August 4, 2024.
From New York, NY | First Appearance Since 2017 | World Premiere | Live Music
Performance Times: Wed 8pm | Thu 8pm | Fri 2pm | Sat 2pm and 8pm | Sun 2pm
Recipient of the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award in 2016, four-time Tony Award-nominated director and choreographer Camille A. Brown continues her meteoric rise creating new work on stage, TV, and film as the founder of Camille A. Brown & Dancers. During this special five-day engagement at Jacob’s Pillow, Brown herself took the stage to perform in an unforgettable world premiere.
Brown is a “prodigious” (VOGUE) Bessie, Obie, and Princess Grace Award-winning choreographer and director. She made history as the first Black director at the Metropolitan Opera to direct a mainstage production when she co-directed Fire Shut Up In My Bones (2021). With the Broadway revival of for colored girls… in 2022 (which earned her a Tony nomination for Best Direction of a Play), she became the first Black woman to direct and choreograph a Broadway play since Katherine Dunham in 1955.
Following her work earlier this spring as the choreographer of the new Alicia Keys musical Hell’s Kitchen—which led to a Tony Award nomination for Best Choreography (her third Tony nomination in this category)—Brown returns to the roots of her own dance company, deepening her exploration of Black joy in the world premiere of I AM in the Ted Shawn Theatre, developed in part through a Pillow Lab residency in 2023. The company will also be performing Turf (an excerpt from ink).
About the World Premiere
While Brown has often disrupted our understanding of the past, in this new work, she imagines a creative space for cultural liberation—conjuring the various ways that joy lives within Black culture, querying the possibilities of imagination, and boldly investigating the future.
Inspired by the “I AM” episode of the HBO series Lovecraft Country and the rhythms of the movie Drumline, this new work picked up where ink (2017) left off by blasting us into a universe where anything is possible. Featuring various dance and music genres of the African Diaspora, I AM included live and original music by Deah Love Harriott, Juliette Jones, Jaylen Petinuad, and Martine Wade. Camille A. Brown performed in this piece along with company dancers.
Lead commissioning support for I AM has been provided by Jacob’s Pillow’s Joan B. Hunter New Work Commission, The Joyce Theater, the Meany Center for the Performing Arts, and the Apollo.
The creation and presentation of I AM was made possible with major support from the Mellon Foundation and additional support from the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project (with lead funding from the Doris Duke Foundation and Mellon Foundation); the Rockefeller Brothers Fund; the Princess Grace Foundation-USA; Masterwork Music and Art Foundation; the Harkness Foundation for Dance; Ford Foundation; and the Howard Gilman Foundation. Public support was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts; the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature; and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
I AM received creative development time and funding support for residencies through Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival’s Pillow Lab (Becket, MA) and the Catskill Mountain Foundation’s Orpheum Performing Arts Center (Tannersville, NY). The work also developed at Kaatsbaan Cultural Park (Tivoli, NY).
The presentation of Camille A. Brown & Dancers was made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, and YoungArts, the National Foundation for the Advancement of Artists.
Watch Camille A. Brown & Dancers on Jacob’s Pillow On Demand:
