Philadanco founder Joan Myers Brown embraces NC visit

PHILADELPHIA DANCE COMPANY

Philadelphia Dance Company, one of the nation's top contemporary dance troupes, will perform May 28 at Knight Theater and participate in a masterclass May 27 at the Gantt Center.

Next week’s Philadelphia Dance Company’s Charlotte performance is a homecoming of sorts for Joan Myers Brown.

Philadanco, one of the nation’s top contemporary dance troupes, will perform May 28 at Knight Theater at Levine Center for the Arts, 430 S. Tryon St. Tickets start at $35 and available at GanttCenter.org or by calling (704) 372-1000. A reception and fireside chat with Brown, Philadanco’s founder, and Ayisha McMillan Cravotta of Charlotte Ballet Academy starts at 6 p.m.

The troupe will also participate in a May 27 masterclass at the Harvey B. Gantt Center at 6:30 p.m. Tickets for the performance, pre-reception and masterclass are available at ganttcenter.org.

The North Carolina tie is important to Brown, 93, a Philadelphia native whose mother Nellie was a nuclear scientist and father Julius was a restaurateur.

“My father was born in a city nobody knows,” she said. “Wadesboro, North Carolina. A small town near South Carolina.”

Brown, who launched Philadanco in 1970, knows dance isn’t for everybody but hopes those who attend will learn the value of art and what it offers.

“Everybody isn’t going to be a doctor or a lawyer,” she said. “If we don’t encourage our art form and maintain it, it’s going to be lost.”

The Charlotte performance will feature pieces titled “A Movement for Five” and “Gate Keepers.”

“A Movement for Five” by Dawn Marie Bazemore is “a work inspired by the events surrounding the Central Park 5 and is aimed to uncover the structure of a community and socio-political system that failed to protect the lives of five innocent young boys in 1991.”

Philadelphia Dance Company founder Joan Myers Brown.

“Gate Keepers” by Ronald K. Brown is “a work portraying dancers as “soldiers walking toward heaven, searching for the wounded and looking out to make a safe haven for others to follow,” reflecting themes of intergenerational care and spiritual guardship.

Philadanco was founded to provide performance opportunities to Black dancers, who were systematically denied entrance to local dance schools and had even fewer professional opportunities. Prior to Philadanco, Brown, whose father grew up in Wadesboro, founded the Philadelphia School of Dance Arts in 1960.

When Brown was a teenager, she studied ballet with hopes of one day becoming a Black ballerina. Due to no dance schools accepting Black students in the 1940s, she became a part of a ballet club at her school. While she was getting closer to her dream, she quickly realized that the training she was receiving was not at the level it needed to be. She would take what she learned from white dancers and teach it to other Black kids, but Brown never steered from her goal of becoming a ballet dancer.

She was dancing at nightclubs before she got the opportunity to perform with artists such as Sammy Davis Jr. and Pearl Bailey. It was when she was traveling with Bailey that she got the idea of opening a dance company.
“I’m going to open up a school and make sure Black girls can be trained,” she recalled telling Bailey.

As the company grew, Brown had to look for a larger space while teaching other styles such as tap and acrobatics in addition to a solid foundation in ballet. When the National Endowment of the Arts was founded in 1972, she got her first grant of $1,000 and was able to pay dancers. Their first paycheck was $150 a week. While she opened the door for Black performers, most of her dancers wound up leaving to train at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York.

“I always felt that I was the training ground for Ailey,” Brown said.

Prior to his passing in 1989, Ailey called Philadanco “a vibrant and creative force.” When he started hiring Brown’s dancers, Ailey told her the training they received at Philadanco raised the level of training provided at his own company.

Although Black dancers have more opportunities than Brown when she was growing up, she still makes it a mission to preserve predominately African American traditions in dance.

“People don’t go to Alvin Ailey to see Mark Morris,” she said. “They go to Mark Morris to see Mark Morris.”

While Brown thinks it’s important for dancers to be trained in different styles, many choreographers aren’t teaching Black dance history. Milton Myers is a teacher of the Lester Horton Technique, which “combined elements of Native American Folk Dance, Afro-Caribbean hip circles, Japanese and Balinese isolations of the upper body, Japanese arm gestures, and a new whole body, anatomical approach to movement.” Although Horton wasn’t Black, it’s dancers like him who keep his technique alive.

“Myers is the only person teaching pure Horton technique,” Brown said. “If he dies, that technique is going to die. We don’t want to lose what’s ours.”

Brown has earned numerous accolades and awards for her work in the dance community. In 2012, she received the National Medal of the Arts, the nation’s highest civic honor for excellence in the arts. The award was presented to her by President Barack Obama, which Brown said was one of the thrills of her life.

“Even though that was the highlight of my life, being recognized by your community and people that you work with and serve is just as important as the big ones,” she said.

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