Christal Brown Interview

I recently had the pleasure of sitting down for coffee with choreographer, dancer, and teacher Christal Brown to talk about her evolution as an artist and the creation of her Bronx-based company, INSPIRIT. As an aspiring performer, fellow female and person of African descent, I felt privileged to share in her musings about the relationship between dance and life. Christal’s insight into the art world and success as an entrepreneur are to be admired by those with fresh aspirations to break into the New York dance scene and still hold on to their dreams, aspirations, and artistic visions.

Chimdi Nwosu: Where did you first get your start? What inspired you to dance? What is your training based on?

Christal Brown: Well, it was kind of a bartering system between my mother and I. When I was nine, she wanted me to take piano and I wanted to take dance. I basically wanted to do anything that would get me away from the piano. Eventually, I got better at dance than I did at piano. So I’ve been there since I was nine. My training started with Tap, Ballet, Jazz, and Acrobatics, and then moved into pointé, and then I took my first Modern class at North Carolina School of the Arts the summer of my eighth grade year, and from then on, I’ve just been dancing. It’s kind of like another language for me. I originally wanted to be a writer, and after that I wanted to be an accountant. And when it was time for me to go to college, I found one that had a dance program and a business program. I majored in dance and minored in business for my undergrad, and that was at University of North Carolina Greensborough. When I graduated from there, I went on to tour with Chuck Davis [African American Dance Ensemble]. I never thought I was talented enough to be a professional dancer. I didn’t put myself on a professional track in college. I put myself on an education track because I wanted to be a dance teacher. My goal at that point was to go to the small town I was from called Kingston, North Carolina and open up a school. It just so happened that the year before I was supposed to graduate, my father passed away and he was going to help me get it together, so then I had to change my plan. My advisors thought I was talented enough to pursue a professional career, so after that I auditioned for Chuck Davis, danced for Alan Grier Woods, who used to be the rehearsal director for Bill T. Jones, toured in Russia and all of the States, left there and took an apprenticeship with the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange where I learned a great deal. She and I actually had a bartering system where I was responsible for her logistically as an assistant and she was responsible for me artistically. While I was doing that, I auditioned for Urban Bush Women and I stayed there for about 3.5 years. Technically, I’m still there. I do community work for them. I started my own company right out of college as a performance ensemble and as an education conglomerate. It’s actually all coming full circle right now. I think envisioning something is one thing and having it come to fruition is another, because it doesn’t always come in the stages that you develop it. And the teaching conglomerate was originally supposed to span the east coast, pulling teachers from all the states that I had been a part of, like DC, North Carolina, Virginia and New York, and pulling them into these teaching situations, so this summer will be our initial launching of dance explorations, which is our summer intensive in Raleigh, North Carolina. That’s in addition to our community-based program, “Project Becoming,” which is targeted toward teenage girls and has been in all five boroughs of New York and now in Charlotte, North Carolina.

CN: Do you want to talk a little bit about that organization? How long has that been going on?

CB: We launched Project Becoming in the summer of 2005, and we launched it in the Bronx, which is our home borough. After that, we received a self-image grant from Ilene Fischer for $20,000 to expand it to every other borough. And then, my best friend, Sanithia Janel Tyson, an educator in the Charlotte, Mecklenburg School District, came up here for the summer and studied the module with us, and took the project back to North Carolina and launched it there last summer, and it’s still going on there. Our goal is to make it a national initiative with one in every state at least.

CN: What was it like working with all those companies that you started dance professionally with? What compelled you to choreograph on your own? What put you on that path?

CB: There are certain people who think of themselves on a track — they think of themselves as a choreographer, as a performer. I’ve always had the opportunity to make work, and I’ve always been asked to make work. I think I’ve always just done it just because I was asked, or just because it was a part of my craft that I wanted to do at that time. I think most of what I’ve learned is by making. I don’t sit and study and contemplate craft. I’ve always had the opportunity to have bodies to work on, whereas other choreographers are mulling over ideas and they’re waiting for the moment to have a company to put it on, and I’ve been blessed in that respect to always have commissions. I’ve been making work for magnet schools and colleges since I was in college, so that’s always been a really great opportunity for me. I do love to make work. Like any artist, it’s a form of catharsis. It’s how you understand your inner workings; it’s how you figure things out. Whether in the process of your learning it or not, after it’s come out of you, you’re able to see something in it. Like, every time I watch a piece that I’ve made, I see something new in it. I can tell what stage of life I’ve been in, what type of situations I’ve been thinking about, or how my global view is changing or how my personal view is changing as a woman and as an artist…and that’s something that’s really intriguing to me — to have that type of catalyst for my own emotional life. I learned that making work is about making it for the people you’re working with, from Chuck [Davis] and from Liz [Lerman] who are very adamant about community engagement, who are very adamant about using the transformative power of art, whether it be your authentic voice or not. When I do commissions, I don’t make work because it’s what I want to make; I make it because of the people who are in the room at the time. I think that when people are doing something that they’re good at and they’re doing it well, it reads much better than trying to get someone to take on a vernacular that’s unknown to their body.

CN: What is the significance of the name of your company? What compelled you to decide the format you’ve chosen for the company?

CB: Well, I’m a fan of legacy. My company right now is based in the Bronx and in my path as an artist. In my thinking, that’s where I landed, but in retrospect, looking at my career now, I feel like I’m part of a larger legacy. I’ve worked with Chuck Davis and Jawole [Willa Jo Zollar] of Urban Bush Women, and they both started their companies in the Bronx, and me coming from both of those institutions as a practitioner and as a learner and as a mentee, and now landing in the Bronx with my own company, I feel like I’m just continuing the work that they’ve started. I was very adamant about having an all-female company to level the playing field, to be sure that other talented female artists that I would come across had the opportunity to engage themselves in an incubation tank, to be around their peers, to grow their work and to grow their artistry. In a lot of instances, male artists were getting jobs right out of college without the same amount of training, without the same talent, without the same investment and I felt a little bit of the burden of choice to do this because, originally, I didn’t set out to have a performance career, but what I’ve done in my life has basically given me the credentials to open doors for other young women. And then it gets me back to my original goal of being a teacher, because I get to teach people about the field. I get to show them what the next steps of their growth as an artist or a choreographer could be if they take a certain prowess of their own engagement of it. I really went through a lot of deliberation on naming the company something I felt was what the company did or what I did to the company, and “inspirit,” the verb, means to infuse, to encourage, to invigorate. So I felt like if we could live up to that model, we’re always going to be making things better, we’re always going to be working on ourselves, and we’re also always going to be developing new things.

CN: Do you employ a certain [movement] technique when training your dancers?

CB: Well, whether it’s my company, my professional company or the students I teach at Middlebury…in the last two years, while I was in residence at movement research, I was able to develop a training module called liquid strength, so even though the company is a repertory company in style, our foundation is liquid strength. So everyone trains off that module, whether we’re doing the work of one of the company members now or one of the company members three years ago. So everyone has the same technical foundation in the room at that time, and liquid strength is a combination of artidian fundamentals, release technique, Cunningham, West African, and basically strategic modern technique…really simple. It starts from the floor, comes to standing, and then goes across the floor, goes in and out of the floor, and it takes about an hour and fifteen minutes to go through the whole thing top to bottom. We use it just like traditional techniques of Graham or Cunningham every day that the company comes together to rehearse — they start with the same warm-up and go together. I think that having that basis — that foundation — builds ensemble, builds unity, and it kind of builds something for them to grow from — a communal language, a communal vocabulary.

CN: When you do create pieces, where does that inspiration come from? Does it come from history, a life lesson or an emotion?

CB: I think it comes from all of that. I just finished making a piece on Saturday called “Waiting for Rain,” and a lot of times when I’m making something, I don’t know what it’s about until it’s over, unless I have a long time to work on it. In this case, I had two days, so I was making and making and making, and by the end of it, I was like, “Oh. I know what this is about.” It was really about transitioning but always having a foundation, coming back, and then balancing and finding yourself at a clear place at the end — as if a storm had passed and you were okay now. Take, for instance, a piece like “Dreams and Visions,” which was the first time that I ever in my life had a year-and-a-half to work on a piece. I was in graduate school, I had a medium of technology and movement, lighting, design — just having time and space to think about an idea… This is all off the top of my head: I was like, “Oh, it’s gonna be about testing what’s real and what’s not real, like how you walk through dreams or how you get clues from your dreams to make things happen in reality.” Then it just started snowballing from there. Now I’m making this piece and I found this text by a poet, Renika Bingham– she was a friend of ours in DC — and that kind of served as the invocation, and then a friend of mine, the composer, Farai Malianga, came into our process. We were just talking and doing improvisation around the studio and talking about what dreams were, what realities were, what you were dreaming about at the time, and those voices got recorded, and that ended up to be part of the sound score by the end. But what I usually start with is an idea, and then I write, and then I go into the studio and just see what happens with my body after that. I don’t try to make it something; I try to see just what comes out. And then, at that point, if what’s coming out is not on the same plane as what I’m thinking, then I start to give myself, or the dancers, assignments… Just different ideas, tools, just making one word… I’ll read them a sentence and just give them a parameter, instead of making one movement per word, and then that turns into a movement phrase and then we dissect the movement phrase, and just take them in different directions, change the levels, things like that.

CN: That’s almost like a lesson itself for them…

CB: Yes, exactly.

CN: I know that difficulty [in choreographing] always comes in choreographing for other bodies and not just your own. What challenges have you faced in that respect?

CB: “Dreams and Visions” was challenging in that. This was the first piece, maybe since 2004, that I did not collaborate with the dancers. Every movement in that piece comes out of my body. There’s no leeway for improv, so that was really hard because I normally only do work like that for other people’s companies, where I can yell at them and then leave. So, with my own company, it was a little difficult because I think of my company as an ensemble of soloists, so a lot of times, I give them their artistic space. But this piece was very important to me, probably the largest piece I’ve made in New York, and so the challenge in figuring out how to communicate with other people what’s going on with your body, and then trying to figure out what internal dialogues would they translate for themselves out of this…because in your body, it’s always very clear. In your body, it’s like, this is what it feels like. But from other people, you have to figure out what it looks like to them, first of all — because what it looks like could be totally different than what it feels like, and then, after you figure out what you think they think it looks like, you have to try to figure out how to make them feel what it feels like. And that didn’t happen for the piece until I had run out of language. I had no more. There was nothing else I could tell them. So I brought in four other choreographers to look at the work, and when they came in, they talked to the dancers and were able to tap into another part of their understanding that I couldn’t because I was too close to it. A lot of times with choreography, you’re so close to the work, because it’s coming out of you, that you can’t let go of what you think is right. 

CN: Also, in that piece, you employed a lot of props, a lot of visual effects as well. What compelled those? How do you even think of including something like the rope that was coming down in the middle of the stage?

CB: When I first started to make the piece, I was thinking a lot about aerial things. I was thinking about dream states and how, when you close your eyes, colors start to change. It’s kind of like a kaleidoscope and you never know what the picture is going to turn into, and how I could create that kind of tapestry without it seeming like it was a distraction from the movement. So a lot of what I was working with was the collaboration of all the elements so that one was no larger than the other. The rope was actually a metaphorical catalyst for how you take something from a dream state into a vision. And really, in my mind, a dream is something that’s ephemeral. It could wash away. You could not remember it, you can remember it, but those parts that you do remember are usually a clue or usually something that you’re going to need later, which is like Déjà vu. You really need that later to make something happen in reality. So that launching onto the rope was really like, “Oh, this is a piece of something to hold onto from this craziness of things going on. And whether I can remember it or not, I’ve touched it. It’s been real at some point.” And, as she’s hanging there, she has a different perspective. She’s kind of figured out that she’s not in the same world as everyone else, even though she drops back into that world and continues on about the work of the day, she’s touched something that’s outside of the normal day. It’s a distortion. People can morph into different things, depending on your perspective. The baby and the mask are meant to look at the same person change states. The soloist just changes states. She’s being manipulated, and then she finds the baby, and then she becomes the manipulator. In a lot of dream analyses, babies and death are looked at as new ideas. You never dream of a person being pregnant when they really are pregnant. I know, I’m from the South, and when someone is really pregnant, you dream of fish. So the baby is a metaphor for new ideas. There are a lot of times where, as human beings, whether we’re proactive or not, we’re not always ready for the things we ask for. And so the dream, when the soloist gets the baby at the beginning and she leaves it, she just has to give it away — she’s not ready. And then, by the end, when she’s gone through these other types of understanding the environment she’s in, she just holds the baby and waits, without anyone coming to get her, without any other distraction around her. She can just stand on the horizon and wait for the next new thing to come about, because now she understands what the idea is.

CN: Are all your dancers from different backgrounds?

CB: Yeah.

CN: Do you use their strengths is assigning roles in pieces?

CB: I think for this piece, I did. I really only made a conscious choice about the soloists, and then everything else I just let come. Malena Lloyd is the soloist, and I really felt like, over this year, or over the time of making the piece, for lack of a better comparison, she looked the most like me in the movement. I could look at her and I knew exactly what I had been thinking when I was making it, so that’s how she got that roll.

CN: Did you employ your own dreams in making the piece — things you had dreamed about in the past that were significant — did they show up in that work?

CB: They’re showing up now, after it’s over. But originally, my only catalyst that I thought was real was that the company itself had been my dream and now it’s reality. I had just recently turned 30 and I was kind of freaking out. I was having a quarter-life crisis because everything I’ve set out to do I’ve done, and it’s a little scary when you’re like, well what’s next? You have to find new dreams. You really have to dig deep and be creative about what you want for your life, because if you’ve done everything that you thought possible, what is left? So that woman, when I look at the piece now, as Malena is standing on the edge of the stage holding that baby and looking out for what’s next, that’s me. It is exactly what’s going on. I’ve run the gamut of things. I’ve been that person behind the curtain in the light. I’ve shifted from many different sectors of my life. I’ve carried ideas for other people. I’ve been manipulated; I’ve been the manipulator. I’ve been the one to watch in the center. I’ve been in the crowd waiting for the rain. I’ve been all those things…and now I’m waiting on the horizon for the next thing to come and find me. The mantra of the company that we say a lot is, “To get there, you must first realize that you are there and everything you need, want or desire is working its way toward you.” So that waiting is something that’s very empowering to people when they know that there is something there for them and all they have to do is be ready to accept it. I have to be very still right now and wait for what’s next. And what came about last week was this teaching intensive in North Carolina, which was always a part of the larger vision, but I had forgotten it. So I’m thinking I have nothing left to do, but you do. There’s something else that’s left. And so, just remembering what we’ve already set out to do is also a part of that. Like, you’ve already created these things that you’ve said that you wanted to do, but you have to just wait, sometimes, and be ready for when the opportunity presents itself to actualize the vision.

CN: I wanted to ask you about “Take That.” What was it like telling that story with your own voice, with your own body, without music, without dancers behind you, and what were you trying to convey in that piece?

CB: Well, I do a series of text-to-movement solos, and I think if, as an artist, I have a niche, that’s what it is. I have a love for words, I have a love for movement and when I put them together, it’s really just a synthesis for me. It’s like, for me, how things should be…and they’re all improvisational, so if you’ve seen “Take That” once, you see it again, it won’t be the same. It’s all about what’s going on in my life at that point. I tried to start writing the monologues, and I usually never get past the second line. And then sometimes they blend into each other. Lines from one will come into another, and I’ve tried to have someone transpose the text and actually learn it, but it falls flat. It makes me feel like I have no space to create within the structure of it. So what I did with “Take That” is I gave myself the first line, which is, “In a tone a language, a timbre that only a daughter would understand, she looked into the back of her closet and said, ‘Take That.’” It really started out as a piece about my mother, and then it kind of spawned into this other thing about having a day job, canceling a wedding and figuring out my own new space in life. So it’s kind of a double-edged sword. For me, it feels really authentic to do the first time, and then later on it kind of starts to lose its luster. It loses its excitement. But for patrons, it’s always very intoxicating. So it’s kind of like a reality show. It gives people an entry point into my life that they wouldn’t already know, and that’s fine. I don’t mind doing it, and it’s great for me. There is another one called “The Cutting Place,” where the most poignant line that people remember is, “I’m the product of a politician mother, a father who lost both his legs in Vietnam, subsequently developed a gambling problem, and my guess is he thought, ‘What the hell else did he have to lose?’” Which is true. I grew up with a father who lost both his legs in Vietnam and he was so doped up on morphine in the hospital that he didn’t even know he didn’t have any legs, tried to stand up and fell flat on his face. So these are how I began as a person. These are the things I remember. So later on, probably back in January, “Take That” took on another element of my brother going to prison, so it took on a lot of different other issues, so it’s really all about what’s going on in my life at the time.

CN: It might be people seeing inspiration for what it is that you create.

CB: Yeah. A friend of mine is a theater director from Turkey, and he says he thinks that people like those pieces because I leave enough space for people to see themselves in it. It’s not so didactic that people are just on my journey. It kind of leaves space for them to think about their own journey and where they were at a time in their life when things like this were going on. He said that he feels like people can connect with it, but it also penetrates another wall so that people can kind of take the work with them.

CN: Is that something you’ll continue to do?

CB: Yeah, I think I’ll always do these solos. There’s another one I do called “Wishes,” where I’m completely nude except for a thong that’s covered in rose petals, and it’s really about cat–callers on the way to the train. I hear men every day. “Oh, I would love to do this for you…” anything! So it starts out in the black, and I clap my hands and the lights come on and I say, “Voila! Your wish has been granted. You now have x-ray vision,” and then it just continues from there. By the end of it, I say something like, “Oh, you’re speechless? I guess we both get our wish.” And I snap my fingers and the lights go out. 

CN: What are your upcoming projects?

CB: Right now we’re trying to put together a women’s month show at Harlem School of the Arts, and then we’ll be at Cotsbon International Art Center in May, and then we’ll be at Middlebury College, where I teach in Vermont in the fall. Right now, our biggest project is really trying to make Project Becoming a national initiative, so we’re trying to figure out a national marketing campaign. If you go to our YouTube site, there’s a video of participants who are talking to Oprah about their experience with Project Becoming, so we’re basically trying to figure out how to use all the aspects of the company to keep it going because performance is not going to be enough, I don’t think, in this new economy. Unless you’re Ailey [Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater] or an internationally recognized company, performing is not going to pay the bills and it’s not going to keep an organization afloat. I think we’re really going to have to lean on our teaching skills. We have a few different curriculums — Right to Dance and Dancing Into the Future — that we do every year in conjunction with the Brooklyn Academy of Music from Africa to America, in the dancer’s body, and we are a vendor with the Department of Education, so I think we’re really going to try to start targeting and marketing those curriculums in the schools to keep our artists afloat.

CN: I was actually about to ask about the economy. I guess it’s everywhere and on everyone’s mind.

CB: Yes, and especially since the arts just got cut out of the stimulus package. Who knows what’s going to happen?

CN: Have you felt the effects now? I know most people are anticipating…

CB: Yeah, Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP) holds a conference in New York every year where every company from across the country and internationally comes to showcase their work for presenters to basically buy it. It’s kind of like an expo, and this year there were the most artists ever but less presenters because arts organizations don’t have budgets to present art, and dance is always the lowest on the totem pole. People will present music and theater way before they’ll present dance because they take such a risk on it because there’s not a cultivated audience for it. So we try to cultivate our audience by doing a kind of guerilla arts festival during the summer where we basically drive around in our borough to five different street corners and just jump out and start performing for people. We invite other artists. We had some young break-dancers with us this year and a vocalist, so it’s kind of like bringing art to the people because if people don’t recognize it or don’t think it’s a part of their daily life, then they won’t pay for it, especially in this country.

CN: If you had the opportunity, what is it that you hope people see in your art that is not explicit? What is the one thing that you wish they knew before they sat down to see one of your pieces or to see your company perform…along the lines of people seeing dance as part of their everyday experience?

CB: I don’t know. I really don’t need the audience to have a background. I make work for regular people. I don’t always tell stories, and I think that’s just an outgrowth of being in the post-modern area of African Americanism. Especially as an undergrad, a lot of African American artists are told that their work is overly didactic, especially coming from the area of African American folklore. That’s what our people do — we tell stories, whether it’s through movement or through language or through song, that’s the lineage we come from. So I think, in an effort to expand my craft and get away from the linear aspect of things, the use of metaphor to then tap into the collective stories of everyone is something that I’m trying to work for. So what I want people to know when they sit down is that they’re going to see a reflection of themselves, whether they can recognize it right then or not. I think something about each one of the pieces that I make has a part of the human experience that it doesn’t mater if it’s dance or even if people are sitting in the audience and the dance is over their head — they’re not even watching the dance, the soundtrack will do something to their mood. I try to think of all the different components of any piece I make on an equal level. That if you don’t see the dancing, if you just sit and listen to the soundtrack, there is a story that’s told through the soundtrack. If you cut the soundtrack off and just watch the dance and the story that’s told through dance, if you don’t do anything but watch the costume changes, there’s another story that’s told through that. If I can get those three things on the same level, if I can get all the components to collaborate, then everybody is going to get something. You can come to the show and be a fashionista, only watch the costumes and go, “Oh!” You can come and be a lover of music. You can come and be a lover of poetry, you can come and be a lover of movement. You can come and be a lover of beautiful women, and you can still get something out of it. A part of you is going to be reflected in there, whether it be something you like or something you dislike…and hopefully dislike, as my mentor Liz Lerman would say: you’ll turn that discomfort into inquiry and learn something else about yourself or about why you were there that day.