Recently at the Joyce Theater in New York, Camille A. Brown and Dancers presented “ink,” the final installation in her trilogy of concert works: “Mr. TOL E. RAncE” (2012) explored minstrelsy past and present and the mask that black people wear merely to survive in the world; “Black Girl: Linguistic Play” (2015), featuring an all female cast, took us behind the mask and revealed the beautiful complexity of black female youth and joy. It could be said that “ink” is the period on the sentence, or more apropos, a ribbon that ties all three in a bow.
“Ink” offers the audience an experience of the spectrum of blackness without being didactic or sentimental. Seated beneath two collages (by David L. Arsenault) depicting images of what could be ancestors, Brown’s opening solo serves as a thesis (as they do in the first two instalments).