Rodney A. Brown is the founder/director of The Brown Dance Project (The BDP) is on faculty at The Ohio State University Department of Dance. Brown’s recent scholarship includes choreography highlighting the Black American male’s proximity to gun violence involving White Police officers in the United States, HIV/AIDS, and the Bible.
The POA integrates the Arts into its curriculum for teacher, learner and community it works with; therefore exposing new communities to the choreography translation of the module is a critical stage in analyzing the performance culture of the POA, which is on the front lines of HIV and AIDS work. Other POA persons whom conscientization provide an angle for performance brought their ideas to the 2015 work in South Africa. For example, Ian Williams presented on the activism of Michael Jackson and questions the methodology of consciousness through art, and how art can “make that change” that we so strive for in the future. Gabriel Peoples is a DJing Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. He and I collaborated to reorganize his earlier piece From Am I: A Poem on Diasporic Love into a Choreopoem. According to Gabriel the part of the poem I choreographed is a meditation on the African diaspora as an idea and a myth sandwiched between and throughout the beautiful people and scenery of South Africa. He asserts the poem conveys the relationship between diasporic love and hatred that apartheid established and becomes this thing that connects Blacks in the U.S. to Blacks in South Africa, while still performing as this barrier that divides us.
The choroepoem involves the full 2015 team. It encourages communication about the performance culture of the POA as well as collaboration and a way to engage the local community. In Johannesburg the Choreopoem acquired an additional element. Rangoato Hlasane (Wits School of Art and Wits School of Education) developed an original musical composition. We made presentations of the choreopoem as a way of showing appreciation at cultural and work sites.
