Camille A. Brown & Dancers 'ink'

The final work in Duke Performances' artist-in-residence Camille A. Brown's visionary trilogy about being black in America, ink celebrates the expressive spirit and style of black men while mourning the way that style has been misunderstood and maligned. ink explores the beauty and power of everyday gesture and the spiritual nature of the ordinary, searching out the stories that live within the bodies of her dancers. The dancing is vivid, impressionistic, and evocative, an engrossing mix of contemporary cultural references and ancestral African imagery. Pulling, stirring, shaking, sewing: Brown and her company, Camille A. Brown & Dancers, distill each action into its essence, then build it into evocative choreography. ink explores the evolution of African-American gestural language and, in doing so, reveals dramatic relationships between old and new.