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The Arts Intel Report

Camille A. Brown & Dancers: I Am

A still from Camille A. Brown’s I Am.

Feb 5–9, 2025
175 8th Ave, New York, NY 10011, USA

Camille A. Brown has enjoyed so many successes in such big arenas that, in a highlight such as this, one can only tick them off: for the Alicia Keys jukebox-cum-memoir musical Hell’s Kitchen, a Tony nomination for Best Choreography and a team win for Best Musical; for the glorious revival of Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, Tony nominations for Best Choreography and Best Direction; for Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones, the breaking of the Met’s persistent color barrier, as its first Black director. I could go on. It’s surprising and heartening, then, that she hasn’t abandoned the concert stage or her ensemble. For I Am—with an original score for drums, piano, voice, and violin, live in the theater—Brown pursues Black superpowers, as she did with her last big company piece, ink. This time, though, she’s not confining herself to precedent or the present but blasting off into the Afro-future. Expect her usual ebullient gestural language, which speaks for the community in the individual and reveals that individual to the community and to us. That is Brown’s superpower. —Apollinaire Scherr