When African-American artists “write their own narratives in dance,” as Camille A. Brown put it to the INDY—including the interior facts of their relationships with friends, family, and spouses; their coming of age; and their history in the African diaspora—their bodies are the ink. That’s the first in a series of private truths made public in Brown’s ink, the revised version of which premiered in Durham last week, part of a series of Duke Performances residencies that will bring us Brown’s whole trilogy this year.
Ink is the concluding chapter in Brown’s first trilogy of evening-length dance pieces, which began with 2012’s Mr TOL E. RancE, an incandescent indictment of a century of warped representations of race in popular entertainment, and 2015’sBLACK GIRL: Linguistic Play, a meditation on the intricate games through which African-American girls learn of the world and come into adulthood.