Choreographer Christal Brown defines flesh as “the barrier between the world and the soul.” Flesh captures “everything we internalize,” she said, and it fills up with memories like a cup. She believes people die once that cup is full.
That philosophy took on deeper personal meaning as Brown cared for her late mother, who suffered from dementia. While her mother’s body was still physically there, many of her memories were gone.
“A lot of people think about flesh as skin or blood or bone,” said Brown, 44, an associate professor of dance at Middlebury College. But to her, flesh adopts a more figurative meaning as an accumulation of the human experience.
Those ideas about life and death form the basis of her latest work, What We Ask of Flesh, a 40-minute performance by Brown’s dance company, INSPIRIT, at Middlebury’s Mahaney Arts Center from November 9 to 11. The show, inspired by a book of poetry of the same name by Remica Bingham-Risher, draws on Brown’s experience of caring for her mother.
“Everything that happens to us leaves residue in our mind, our body, our spirit.” Christal Brown
Six dancers perform contemporary choreography, set to live improvised music with drums, piano and electronic instruments, against a backdrop of abstract geometric sketches projected onto two screens. The dancers shift between intense and tender movements — from huddling and stomping their feet in unison to pausing in an embrace. Each dancer embodies a different aspect of the human experience, which Brown has typified as compassion, curiosity, survival, violence, love and flesh.
In one scene, dancers take on the voice of “flesh” and chant, “Break me. Make me. Hold me. Mold me. Turn me inside out.” Performers also periodically slip behind the screens to dance with only their silhouettes visible. In literally hiding dancers’ flesh, the screens seem to divide the stage between two worlds suggestive of life and death. The result is a show that aims to highlight how life experiences manifest in the body.
“Everything that happens to us leaves residue in our mind, our body, our spirit,” Brown said. “We’re tracking how flesh continues to take on experience until it can’t take any more.”
Brown founded INSPIRIT in 2000 after touring nationally and internationally with dance companies such as Chuck Davis’ African American Dance Ensemble, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, Urban Bush Women and Bebe Miller Company. Since then, INSPIRIT has produced works such as The Opulence of Integrity, which celebrates the life and legacy of acclaimed boxer Muhammad Ali, and Same but Different, a piece about Brown’s relationship with her friend, the dancer and choreographer Lida Winfield.
Seven years in the making, What We Ask of Flesh started out as a solo piece influenced by Bingham-Risher’s poetry about biblical women. Then, while Brown began revising the piece for an ensemble, her mother died. Brown’s grief gave her clarity about the deeper meaning of the work, she said. With renewed understanding, she brought in collaborators from across the country to work on the piece while living together during residencies at Jacob’s Pillow in Becket, Mass., and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.
“There’s a time when something inside is already done before the life is done or before the body gives way to the passing. That congealed my understanding of what we’re really making,” Brown said in a documentary about INSPIRIT’s residency at Jacob’s Pillow.
As Brown brought in additional collaborators, the piece evolved. For example, stage designer Scotty Hardwig added the projections behind the dancers. Hardwig drew the intricate images by hand as part of his own meditative practice. Many are abstract depictions of parts of the body or of nature, such as a womb, a rising sun or falling feathers.
Brown also encourages her dancers to add personal touches to the show. Rather than performing the same choreography every time, dancers can choose from a range of movements based on how they’re feeling in the moment. Brown likened this kind of improvisation to performers all reading from the same book but selecting which page to read at any time.
Robin Wilson, a professor of dance at the University of Michigan who portrays “flesh” in the show, said much of the choreography evolved through improvisation. For Wilson, moving extemporaneously makes the dances more personal. “There’s a lot of emotional labor in the performances for each of us,” she said. “It’s not ‘performed’ with quotation marks. It is not acted. It’s lived.”
At the end of the performance, Wilson points up in the air and says “yes” emphatically, then moves into the shadows and sings “yes,” holding the note for several seconds. Wilson said the ending reflects flesh dying and coming back again, hinting at the afterlife or “something beyond this moment in time.”
Brown emphasized that the performance does not convey a specific message. While she sees grief in the piece, others may see something different. As Brown watched her mother die, she said, she felt her mother’s spirit leave before her body. That separation between body and soul is part of what she hoped to capture in her piece.
“Everything that happens to a person is stored somewhere in the visceral memory of the body,” she said. “When that visceral memory or that membrane gets full, then that’s the capacity of life.”
What We Ask of Flesh, Thursday, November 9, and Friday, November 10, 7:30 p.m.; and Saturday, November 11, 2 p.m., at Mahaney Arts Center Dance Theatre, Middlebury College. $5-25. middlebury.eduINSPIRIT dancers
The original print version of this article was headlined “The Way of the Flesh | A new Middlebury dance performance explores the burdens we carry in our bodies”
This article appears in Nov 1-7, 2023.
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