Today we’d like to introduce you to Bernard Brown.
Hi Bernard, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I am a dance artist, choreographer, arts activist, educator, and administrator who situates their work at the intersection of Blackness, Queerness, belonging, and memory. With an extensive performing career, I now serve as Executive Artistic Director of Bernard Brown/bbmoves, choreographing for stage, specific sites, film, and opera and facilitating master classes, residencies, and other activations internationally, namely in Italy, Israel, Korea, Burkina Faso, and Brazil, and across the US including On The Boards, REDCAT, Royce Hall, Johns Hopkins University, California African American Museum, and hyperlocal activities such as a guided embodied walk through historic Leimert Park and leading movement activities for activists at Los Angeles City Hall. A first-generation college graduate, I am an Assistant Professor of Dance at UC San Diego, and a Certified Katherine Dunham Technique Instructor. The Los Angeles Times has called me “…the incomparable Bernard Brown…”
My life in the arts began with a desire for expression, first through instrumental music, then voice, and ultimately dance. I began dancing in public school in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). I was raised by my maternal grandmother, Doris Lee Wright, a southern Black woman who instilled ideals of faith, integrity, and tenacity into me and my sisters. Being from South Central Los Angeles, growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, societal messages about what a young Black boy could do and achieve were limited, at best. Having the arts, specifically dance, find me was the inflection point of life-changing transformation. My first classes were with Ujazi Calomee at 32nd Street/ USC Visual and Performing Arts Magnet. At our first performance, weeks after that first class, I met my mentor, Lula Washington. Ms. Washington invited me to train at her school on a lifelong scholarship. I was amongst a primarily Black student body where we trained intensively in multiple movement forms – West African, Tap, Hip Hop, Modern, Jazz, Ballet, Stepping, and Gymnastics. I, personally, took 13 classes per week. The training I received went well beyond the physical rigors of dance. It is through my education at Lula Washington Dance Theatre that I began to understand dance as culture, dance as storytelling, and dance as activism. I saw Black leadership and Black luminaries as commonplace. Being there gave me a foundation toward activism, theater, and understanding Blackness as expansively nuanced. This collection of lessons set me on a path, of success, uniquely my own.
Dance became my passport. Graduating from Idyllwild Arts Academy as the first African-American male in dance, I became the first in my family to graduate college. Throughout this period, I trained on scholarship at The Ailey School and Dance Theatre of Harlem. I began my professional career after graduating from Purchase College. I have had the great honor to work with esteemed leaders of the dance field including Lula Washington, Rennie Harris, Rudy Perez, Lucinda Childs, David Rousseve, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Dwight Rhoden, Doug Elkins, Willi Ninja, Jessica Lange, to name a few. After performing across multiple continents, my hunger for learning led me to earning my Masters of Fine Arts in Choreographic Inquiry from UCLA. During that time, I founded my dance company, Bernard Brown/bbmoves. The company, founded in 2015, will celebrate our 10-year anniversary milestone in the fall of 2025! In those nearly 10, our social justice, Black & Queer-led and Black-centered dance company has connected with communities across the United States, West Africa, and Asia. Moving seamlessly from graduate school to full-time academic teaching, I earned my MFA in June 2017 and joined the professoriate as a full-time tenure track professor at Sacramento State University in August of the same year. Since then, I have been on faculty at Loyola Marymount University and have recently accepted an appointment as a full-time tenure track Assistant Professor of Dance at UC San Diego. My work as an educator, choreographer, and citizen artist is bound up in service. That service can be read as commitment to community, consciousness, or activism – or an amalgalm of these ideas. My work is rooted in catalyzing social change through dance. Dance sparks dialogue which in turn, inspires action, resulting in the action creating change within our communities. Centering, Blackness, Queerness, belonging and memory, I am interested in excavating the ways in which art can transform, activate ripples of empathy, and foster healing.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I believe in the transformative power of dance and storytelling from the depths of my being. Systemic change necessitates a multi-pronged approach, attacking these behemoth systems (e.g. systemic racism, prisons, and homophobia) on multiple fronts. My grandmother, a southern Black woman, reared me with many colloquialisms, one such being “There is more than one way to skin a cat,” meaning there are multiple ways to look at an issue and work towards solutions. Grounded in this particular cultural knowledge, I use this pluralistic approach in all aspects of my artistic, personal, and political endeavors.
Building something from a thought is akin to alchemy. Every turn has had its challenges. Challenges are essentially learning opportunities and chances to ask for help. When I found rejection in the funding arena, I asked for help. The help came in the form of mentorship from a community of writing experts, community organizers, academic leaders, dance icons, and regular people that had the potential to share. I, now, pay all the knowledge I’ve been freely given forward to folks in my orbit. Larger challenges, like racism, is something that remains a societal effort. My work is to continue to sound the alarm for truth and justice in every room I enter. I take on this challenge everyday. I enlist all that can hear my voice, with a radical joy, to face our individual and collective challenges – head on, from underneath, above and behind! In my circle, we know there is a solution.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Bernard Brown/bbmoves, founded in 2015, began as a call to action. Inspired by arts and social justice movements of the past and present, Bernard Brown/bbmoves aims to serve as a conduit for the oppressed to express their voices. Melding African Diasporic movement and postmodern sensibilities, our mission is to create and present dance theater performance and educational engagement that welcomes and challenges our audiences (and collaborators) to collectively celebrate the diverse, intersectional richness across the African Diaspora, interrogate systems that seek to marginalize communities, and conspire for a clearer understanding of our shared humanity. Executive Artistic Director, Bernard Brown, has been featured in Dance Magazine, the New York Times and Los Angeles Times for his Dance Activism. Bernard Brown/bbmoves has been presented at prestigious venues including Royce Hall, REDCAT, Aratani Theatre, Highways Performance Space, Fowler Museum, ODC Theater, Los Angeles Dance Festival, HomeLA, Japanese American National Museum, On The Boards, Seoul International Dance Festival In Tank, California African American Museum, and the Crocker Art Museum. The company’s work has been supported by the City of Los Angeles’ Department of Cultural Affairs, Sacramento State University, and Dance/USA. The company has collaborated with music producer and multihyphenate Los Angeles artist DeFacto X, jazz pianist, Steven T. Gordon, award-winning filmmaker, Jingqui Guan, Emmy-nominated composer Karam Salem, prison activist, hip hop theater innovator and spoken word poet Bryonn Bain, and jazz great, Kenny Burrell.
Our work encompasses four areas –
Creative Work: dance performance, choreogarphy, artmaking, filmmaking, and collaboration.
Education: teaching, curriculum design and implementation, consulting, and community engagement.
Activism: co-organizing, and advocacy.
Service: mentorship, specifically.
While I am not the center of the work of bbmoves, I can say that my creative work as a performer, choreographer, and the executive and artistic lead of the company is not separate from the activated, change-making work I am part of in academic and activist spaces. Quite the opposite, my work is integrated. The work in all the circles I congregate in scaffolds and builds upon itself. This statement is true also for the collective of artists, activists and community partners that constellate around Bernard Brown/bbmoves. We are choreographic thinkers, embodied storytellers, and movement builders.
We are proud to share about our future project “Sissies: Something Perfect Between Ourselves” as a multimodal, multiyear project. “Sissies: Something Perfect between Ourselves,” an exhibition by, for, and about Black, Brown, and Indigenous Queer artists who have created spaces that feed the music, dance, fashion and creative heartbeat of underground queer LA. Rooted in the African proverb “Until the lion tells the story, the hunter will always be the hero,” this project explores a range of artistic modes – dance/performance, film/photography, fashion, and music – mediums that document Black+Brown+Queer stories as something integral to humanity. “Sissie,” produced and co-curated by Pieter Performance Space and choreographer Bernard Brown, will honor the legacy of LA’s Black Queer parties and clubs, which have served as a home for activism, joy, and care across decades. This project is in its development stage. We cannot wait to share it with our communities.
Our upcoming events can be experienced at The Getty Museum (May 17), The East Palo Alto Center (May 30), danceBox – Kobe Japan (June 30), Arts in Tank Dance Festival – Seoul (July 2-6), and Chilliwack Cultural Center – British Columbia, Canada (October 24).
What does success mean to you?
The company’s internal logic around success is often defined as making work beautiful (broadly defined) and impactful while centering our community. Our communities are inclusive. Our communities represent the best of humanity. Our communities uplift, love, and revere Black people, Queer people, people of color, immigrants, Transgender people, and Indigenous people. Success is having our communities witness and feel that their experiences, as authentically as possible, are present in everything that we do. We focus on a Black, Queer, and radically empathetic aesthetic that is founded in the liberated body in motion. We continue to collaboratively build (and reassess) rubrics that satisfies a broad and inclusive measure of success.
Personally, my ultimate goal, as a success, is liberation and justice for all people.
I am guided by a chant by the revolutionary, Assata Shakur.
“It is our duty to fight for our freedom.
It is our duty to win.
We must love each and support each other.
We have nothing to loose but our chains!”
This works as a mantra, when coupled with action. With our collective might and gifts, we can vision and create a new world…one step at a time.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.bbmoves.org
- Instagram: @bb.moves @renaissancebrown
- Facebook: @BBMoves
- Other: https://defactox1.bandcamp.com/album/un-broken-a-burkina-faso-suite-2
Image Credits
Jingqui Guan, Angel Origgi, Steve Rosa, and Seoul International Dance Festival in Tank.
