Bernard Brown
email   Phone:  213.805.1903   Los Angeles, California

Bernard Brown - selected biography:

Dancer:

• Doug Elkins Dance Company (New York, NY) touring Europe and stateside

• bopi’s black sheep/dances by kraig patterson (New York, NY) 

• Shapiro and Smith Dance (Brooklyn, NY) for 5 seasons (Brooklyn, NY)

• Louis Johnson Dance Theatre Ensemble (New York, NY)

• TU Dance Company (MInneapolis, MN))

 
Choreographer:

• “C’mon Now” Patrick's Cabaret (Minneapolis, MN)

• “Treemonisha” by Scott Joplin, Skylark Opera (formerly North Star Opera) (Minneapolis, MN) 

• Others:  “Black Moon Rising”, “Love Songs”, “Losing Momentum”

 
Dance Teacher:

• Lula Washington Dance Theatre (California)

• Tisch School of the Arts at NYU (New York City)

• Tappan Zee Dance Group (Westchester, NY)

• University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (Minneapolis, MN)

• Zenon Dance (MInneapolis, MN)

• Ballare Teatro (Minneapolis, MN)

 
Featured Work:

• “Grant Me Serenity, Courage, And Humility…”

  • Bernard Brown is investigating the bipolar sense of home and community African-Americans feel as a result of the conflict between the US's melting pot and African-American's uprooting from their native Africa

  • Impetus:  

    • Dialogues about many African-American's lack of:

      • Solid family structure, home life

      • Community, father figures, role models/cultural leaders

      • Connections to a “homeland” distant in miles and conscientiousness or to their fellow African-Americans;

    • Our use of outside sources to fill these voids with materialism, sex, and drugs

  • Jimi Hendrix symbolism (artist of multiracial heritage)

    • Transformation into a poster boy for America's  sense of innovation and its melding of cultures and peoples

    • Short life journey and his battles 

    • Unbalanced sense of self, culturally (through race & nation), musically and emotionally. 

    • Legacy of defiance and triumphs

  • Music: a live recording of Jimi Hendrix’s “The Star Spangled Banner”

• “…my life as an onion…”

  • Layered, literally and figuratively, revising Brown's first Minnesotan winter as an outsider as a gay Black Male Artist from Los Angeles. 

  • Learning quickly that to layer is to be warm, layering also works on many levels

    • Interpersonal

    • Spiritual

    • Protection from the elements and “Minnesota nice"

  • “Peel away…peel away…” the calloused layers built up over the seasons…

• “M.H.B.Y.”

  • “Ever laugh because you couldn’t cry no mo’?”  - Bernard Brown

  • Abstract family journal

  • Inner life of struggle, joie de vivre and endurance

  • Music:  Bjork "Frosti" and others

   

Bernard Brown
bbmoves09@aol.com
213.805.1903 mobile
myspace.com screen name: bbexperiences