The Transformative Power of Dance...
What critics have said...
"...the incomparable Bernard Brown..."
"Absolutely stunning performance..."
Steven Vargas, LA Times
"Black Lives Matter, social justice, activism and gender politics were strong threads throughout the works on show...Bernard Brown...evoked these issues in their work."
"Bernard dances like freedom personified—earth turned flesh. Through his alchemical movement, Bernard redefines the meaning of ‘freedom.’ He reframes, reclaims, renegotiates, and conjures a version of Freedom that he not only has a right to, but that his own luminous Black body radiates.”
"It was regrettable that I was able to see 〈Box〉(starring Bernard Brown's choreography), which is based on Henry Box Brown, a black man who risked his life in the United States in the 19th century, only through video."
"...the dancers’ movements were captivating, making the space blurred with the expansiveness of them all."
Jill Lindsey, ladancereview.com
"Special mention goes to the powerful The Weight of Sugar directed by Jingqiu Guan and choreographed by Bernard Brown. It is a gorgeously shot film through which Guan and Brown expressed the cruelty and suffering that the sugar cane plantations owners hoisted onto Black slaves and the perseverance they endured to survive and thrive."
"...powerfully exquisite work."
Dr. Halifu Osumare, dance scholar
"The Weight of Sugar, a study on the import and export of human beings and colonisation through the prism of sugar, was also opinionated and powerful."
"...exceptional dancing and choreography seething with confrontational intimacy."
Jennifer Passios, artintercepts.org
"Bernard Brown/bbmoves, with his “sugar cravings” mesmerized all of us...How sweet it was."
"...Brown left us with a message of hope and to embrace this time to learn about ourselves."
“Brown performs this falling and rising repetition suggesting to me that there is a beingness to Blackness that repeatedly rises beyond, against, and after death…Brown refutes this blood stained land with the repetition of his rising. Brown dances a groove that is joyful, form driven, colorful, alive…we were lucky witnesses of this world he creates, offerings to a future world born anew.”
"'Leanin’ In,' a powerful solo about fighting back and continuing forward despite the odds.
"...the spiffiness of Mr. Brown's fireball style."
"...the finely etched gesture and a soaring jump of Bernard Brown."