Changing Currents: A Reflection
Changing Currents: José Brown and (Post)modern Dance in the US
Overview
This digital exhibition explores the life and work of José Brown. It features selected items from the José Brown Collection, which Reed College is privileged to hold. The aim of this exhibition is to highlight some of Brown’s many contributions to US dance history, with particular emphasis on his training at Reed and professional work in Portland. Brown openly identified as black, Native American, gay, HIV-positive, and poor; these identities shaped his career path as as well as his artistic work. The co-curators developed this project during the summer of 2020. We digitized the collection and conducted interviews amid the heady conjunction of mass mobilizations against anti-Black police violence and the COVID-19 pandemic. As we learned about Brown’s activism and its connections to his work as a dancer, protesters in Portland flooded the streets, defiant before local and federal police quick to deploy violent modes of suppression. And as we learned about Brown’s final days living with HIV-AIDS, the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the effects of structural racism, disproportionately impacting communities of color across the US. With each day, the urgency of bringing this material to light increased.
Brown began his dance training at Reed College with Judy Massee between 1968-1970 before finishing his degree in dance at the California Institute of the Arts. Brown then moved to New York City where he danced with a number of important choreographers associated with postmodern as well as modern dance styles, including Rudy Perez, Pearl Lang, and Alwin Nikolais. Brown returned to Portland in the mid-1970s to open a studio and found his company, Changing Dance Theater. The company’s repertory showcased Brown’s electric choreographies and performed on and off for years, including engagements at prominent New York City venues including the Merce Cunningham Dance Studio, La MaMa Theatre, and St. Mark’s Church. His works, such as Satyricon 2000, incorporated postmodern devices including pastiche, site specific projects, and an emphasis on the ordinary.
Dance research focused on the postmodern experiments that marked the 1960s and 1970s in the United States has focused overwhelmingly on a select group of artists based in New York City. Scholars have documented how dancers including Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Deborah Hays, Steve Paxton, and Simone Forti experimented with new approaches to dance making that changed the field (Banes 1987, 1993, & 1994; Burt 2006). All were associated with the Judson Memorial Church, a downtown performance venue that showcased the choreographic methods now synonymous with postmodern dance. The works presented at Judson featured the use of pedestrian gestures that challenged the distinctions between dance and everyday movement, favored conceptual approaches, and rejected the expressiveness and technical virtuosity that marked ballet as well as modern dance. Some of the better known pieces from this era include Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A (1966), a solo work that includes no music and strings together a series of everyday movements like walking and kneeling. In 1960, Steve Paxton famously created a one-minute dance composed solely of eating a sandwich on a beach. The Judson experiments have held ongoing interest for dance historians as well as the general public; the success of the Museum of Modern Art’s 2018-2019 exhibit “Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done” once again brought this period of dance history into the spotlight.
Scholarship on postmodern dance has begun to challenge, however, both the limited geographic and temporal scope that Judson’s dominance implies as well as the lack of attention paid to how categories of social difference (particularly race, gender, sexuality, and class) relate to postmodern dance practice. Janet Ross’s research on Ana Halprin’s decades-long career in the Bay Area helped to expand both postmodern dance’s geography as well as its accepted time frame (Ross 2007). An exciting new body of research aims to address the second gap in the literature. Previous studies noted that early postmodern dance’s formalism had the effect of minimizing attention to identity-based questions; however, this was often explained as an aesthetic choice that characterized the 1960s and 1970s. The dominant historiography often identifies the 1980s as the decade when choreographers began to explicitly question race and gender inequities. Rebecca Chaleff’s pioneering work (2018) has demonstrated how this narrative both justified the canonization of white Judson-affiliated artists and subsequent erasure of the contributions of choreographers of color at the same time that it obscured how Judson-esque choreographic methods, particularly their emphasis on the “ordinary,” ultimately privileged whiteness. Others have excavated histories that challenge the idea that postmodern dance was uninterested in engaging questions of social difference. Rebecca Rossen’s study of Jewish identity in US-based modern and postmodern dance (2014), Ramón Rivera-Servera’s work with Puetro Rican postmodern choreographers (2014), and Victoria Fortuna’s analysis of Judson-affiliated Ruby Perez’s work all aim to expand our understanding of postmodern dance with particular attention to race and ethnicity (2014). This digital exhibition aims to support and contribute to this growing body of literature.
This project argues that considering Brown’s work within the context of postmodern choreographic practices in the US not only offers a much needed emphasis on the life and work of choreographers of color, but also a critical contribution to the limited scholarship on dance history in the Pacific Northwest region generally and Portland specifically. Toward this end, we build on the work of dance historian Martha Ullman West (who kindly participated in this project as an interviewee) and dancer/documentarian Eric Nordstrom (who participated as a valued guide). Lousie Steinman’s beautiful obituary in Reed Magazine was also a critical resource. Furthermore, this research contributes to Reed College’s understanding of its own dance history. While the dance major itself only launched in Fall 2016, Brown’s links to Reed speak to a much longer history of dance pedagogy and practice at our institution that illuminate Reed’s connections to the broader development of the dance field.
Brown at Reed
Brown began studying at Reed in 1968 as a scholarship student. The 1960s as a decade —and the year 1968 in particular—brought sweeping cultural, social, economic, and scientific changes that profoundly transformed the world. Brown participated in the campus-based resonances of the ongoing Civil Rights movement as a member of the Black Student Union (BSU). In this image from December 11, 1968 , you see Brown participating in an occupation of the administrative offices in Eliot Hall. Among the BSU’s demands were the creation of a Black Studies program and recruitment of Black faculty. In 2019, the Reed History Project created an exhibition featuring archival material from the 1968 protests. The BSU’s protest led to the creation of a short-lived Black Studies program. The present Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies major, however, was not officially launched until fall 2018, on the heels of more recent student-led social justice movements including Diversify Reed (2014-2015) and Reedies Against Racism (2016-2018).
At Reed, Brown cultivated the passion for dance that drove the rest of his life. Several interviewees noted the special relationship that Brown shared with Judy Massee, who directed the dance program at Reed from 1968-1996. The importance of their relationship is evident in their correspondence. Peggy Choy, a choreographer and Associate Professor of Dance at UW-Madison, was a student with Brown in one of Massee’s Graham-focused technique classes. She spoke of Brown’s joyfulness as a dancer and as a person, describing Brown as someone who “was trying to relate the best part of himself to us.” Choy recalled how the class shaped not only Brown’s life in dance, but also her own.
While Massee’s classes inspired Brown to continue his dance training, being a young black queer man at Reed brought with it the challenges of existing and learning in an predominately white space. On the one hand, as close friends (and Reed community members) Aron Faegre and George Cummings note, studying at Reed represented a tremendous opportunity for Brown to explore his interests and to distance himself from his biological family, who did not embrace Brown’s interests or sexuality. At the same time, however, life at Reed was also marked by the experience of not fully belonging. Experiences of marginality and precarity, in tandem with the joy and drive to connect recalled by Choy, marked the remainder of Brown’s career.
Artistic Project
Review of the collection and interviews with Brown’s close friends and students revealed the difficulty of easily categorizing Brown’s work. His broad repertoire defies neat delineation into the category of modern or postmodern: hence the use of (post)modern in our title. Brown’s eclectic stylistic choices were accompanied by near constant movement across the global. While Portland and New York City were touchstones for Brown, he also spent time in Japan, Denmark, Germany, Spain, India and Nepal.
Brown founded Changing Dance Theater in Portland in the mid-1970s. The company initially rehearsed in a studio in the Pythian Building on SE Yamhill St. “Changing” was an apt name for several reasons. On the one hand, it represented the eclectic nature of Brown’s choreographic work. However, it also emphasized the fluidity—and instability—that characterized the company. The company did not have a stable ensemble, but rather engaged dancers as possible. Funding was equally unstable, with Brown often self-financing works and struggling to cover production costs. While Brown inhabited the physical space in the Pythian Building for only a few years during the 1970s, Changing Dance Theatre embraced its name even more fully in the coming decades, materializing wherever in the world Brown was and with whatever resources were available. The document “José Brown and Changing Dance Theater Performances” [link] lists the company’s many works and the diverse venues in which they were presented across the globe.
The eclectic nature of Brown’s works also marked his approach to teaching. As close friend and artistic collaborator Vincent Martínez-Grieco shared, Brown’s rigorous— “relentless” in Martínez-Grieco’s (loving) words—classes incorporated the broad range of techniques that Brown had studied, including, ballet, modern, and butoh, among others. The physicality that characterized his teaching also marked his performance quality as a dancer. Friends and collaborators alike emphasized Brown’s explosive approach to movement, which involved committing his body and mind fully to his performances. This spirit of relentless commitment in the face of challenge—physical, spiritual, financial, relational— is palpable throughout the documents compiled on this site.
Legacy
Brown’s relentless and vibrant enthusiasm to create continued up until the very end of his life when he passed of complications due to HIV at 10:15 AM on May 1st, 1996. In a letter to Brown’s loved ones, Brown’s close friend George Cummings wrote, “I do not know whether José ever accepted death. [...] He was determined to get better and carry on with work.” In reading such heart wrenching letters detailing a life full of potential cut short by a government-mishandled illness, it is almost impossible to not draw comparisons between the COVID-19 pandemic and the HIV/AIDS pandemic. During pandemics marginalized populations have always been unable to access proper health care measures; Black, Native, and Latinx populations in the U.S. are disproportionately affected by COVID-19 due to systematic economic racism, land displacement, and mass racial incarceration, leading to the majority of BIPOC folks being unable to even purchase the necessary PPE to protect themselves from COVID, being forced to continue working blue collar jobs during a pandemic, and being unable to seek proper and unbiased medical care if they do contract the disease. It is clear that the HIV/AIDS pandemic disproportionately affected a marginalized population due to the manner of transmission making members of the LGBT+ much more susceptible to contracting the disease, which again caused members of the community (especially poor, trans, or Black members of the community) to not receive unbiased and proper medical care. Because of HIV/AIDS’s association with homosexuality and thus immorality, the mainstream American public wanted to distance themselves from the disease as much as possible, many seeing it as God’s punishment for homosexuality. This strongly juxtaposes the mainstream reaction to COVID-19, a disease much more easily spread through society-deemed socially acceptable activities from NFL games to amphibian Floridian bars to Hollywood movie premiers. Hence, the struggle of COVID-19 is easily appropriated by those not materially suffering the consequences, the celebrities, politicians, and other elite affected by cancellations and a rapidly failing economy. Contemporary representation and response to COVID-19 in the media drastically outweighs the contemporary media representation of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, however most mainstream media relating to the COVID-19 pandemic centers the struggles of quarantine; the media again neglects to show a houseless, Black, Native-American, gay, or ill perspective. José Brown suffered with HIV/AIDS for 11 years of his life, but he suffered from poverty and systematic racism each of his 46 years on Earth. Brown’s story leaves one solemnly wondering what would have happened if he had simply gotten the recognition, support, and funding that his more privileged counterparts received? A community, whether that be the LGBTQ+ community, the Reed community, or the New York postmodern dance community, is only doing as well as the most underserved person in the community. No longer can we solely amplify and fund privileged voices, movement, and ideology; As much as Brown’s story is inspirational and honorable, Brown and people like him (especially in this modern age of COVID-19) don’t exist to be tragic martyrs for amazing art shown in an exhibit years after the artist’s death due to community and governmental neglect. It is time that we start honoring, privileging, funding, and amplifying the voices of those in need. Our capitalist society rewards only traditionally profitable activities, leading to the daily loss of artists just as deserving as Brown. Knowing the audience that this article will likely reach as it is currently available through the Reed website, the co-curators of this collection find it imperative to end with a call to action. Start supporting marginalized communities now. Dig deep into your pockets for gofundme campaigns supporting LGBT+ medical funds, volunteer a significant amount of your time to houseless services, buy that large piece you’ve been eyeing from a Black, Indigenous, or other artist of color, put your body on the line at protests for racial equity if you can. There is no one simple solution to generations upon generations promoting institutional racism, ableism, and homophobia, and oftentimes the activism is uncomfortable, however Brown’s story is just one story that ultimately demonstrates that inaction (personal, institutional, and societal) is violence.