REVIEW
Evidence reveals beautiful moves in search of a choreographic direction

Rachel Howard, Special to The Chronicle

Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Talents of that magnitude don't announce themselves every day, and Brown reasonably became a great new choreographic hope. But last weekend's engagement of Brown's own New York-based company, Evidence, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts worryingly suggested that Brown's promise is not being fully realized. To be sure, his work should be seen more often in San Francisco, and in longer runs (these two performances, presented by the center's performing arts series, sold out). But this was not the revelation of a bold American voice at its most articulate or eloquent. Most of the works looked like they had nothing much specific to say.

Hidden Stories
Tempering struggle with the scent of heaven
by DEBORAH JOWITT for the Village Voice

Brown used to tackle — or at least broach — specific narratives: family history, AIDS, violence in the African American community. Those traces of the particular don't appear in the works featured on Program A of his Joyce season. Themes of journey, confrontation, and transformation are expressed through variegated, full-out dancing.

published: February 13, 2006

His dances are drawn from spiritual voyages
When Ronald K. Brown established his company, Evidence, in Brooklyn in 1985 , he was only 19, a virtuosic and charismatic dancer. He’d performed with the Jennifer Muller Company, but he wanted to create his own works, not dance those of others.

Now one of America’s top choreographers, Brown, 40, creates dances in a distinctive high-energy style, blending influences from African, Caribbean, and modern dance as well as ballet and hip-hop.

Ordered steps
Ronald K. Brown at the Majestic

Brown’s downtown-Brooklyn style combines easy, even cocksure strides with West African polyrhythms: the choreography reads as ancestral culture breaking through the crust of urban life. A big loping entrance suddenly gives way to an angular break at the knees and turns into kneeling; lanky Juel Lane’s forward locomotion is arrested and flung backward by a hunch of his shoulder and by Chad Boseman’s text describing a junkie’s sensuous last date with his crackpipe.