One Shot merges photography with choreography
Monday, May 12th, 2008
When choreographer Ronald K. Brown was approached about creating a dance that incorporated images by a photojournalist, he had a shock of recognition.
Postcards of Charles “Teenie” Harris’ work had been hanging in Brown’s apartment for a decade.
“I knew these images well but had no idea who had taken the photos,” Brown said. “I was drawn to Harris’ world immediately.”
Brown’s Evidence, A Dance Company will perform One Shot tonight at the Wortham Theater Center. The multimedia dance was commissioned by the August Wilson Center for African American Culture and is being presented here by the Society for Performing Arts Houston and DiverseWorks.
Starting in the mid-1930s, Harris documented four decades of Pittsburgh life as a photographer at the Pittsburgh Courier. He captured the urban existence of middle-class African-Americans; photographed jazz stars such as Duke Ellington, Lena Horne, Ahead Jamal and Sarah Vaughan; and was on hand to record the burgeoning civil rights movement. Harris died in 1998.
Brown organized Harris’ photos into categories such as “Free Spirits” and “Faith and Decadence,” to give a structure to the dance.
Harris’ elegant photos come and go, change shape and size, move in and out of focus, and to some extent are choreographed as well.
“I wanted the photos to have a movement presence on stage,” he said. “I didn’t want to make it a slide show.”
The interplay between the images and the dancers created a lively juxtaposition, Brown said. “The dancers actually partner with the photos. Sometimes the dancers turn around and look at them, as if to acknowledge these faces from the past.”
This work is not the first time the New York choreographer, who started his company at age 19, has merged photography and dance. As part of a residency through the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston, Brown worked with dance and photography students simultaneously to demonstrate how telling a story is where the two art forms meet.
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