José Brown: Arte Povera

As you watch the video of “Soldiers,” José Brown's last dance performance, it won't occur to you that you are watching someone who is gravely ill, who will be dead in a scant year's time. Instead, you'll be mesmerized by the fluidity of his movements, his stamina. The clarity of his focus.You'll marvel at his exuberantly eclectic dance vocabulary: Japanese Butoh, Afro-Haitian, Kathakali, Martha Graham. The music he dances to is as varied as his moves: from Bach's Brandenburgs to Phillip Glass' Satyagraha to Sam Cooke's tender “Bring It on Home to Me.” In my favorite section, José — dressed in white dress shirt and pleated slacks — dances ruminatively to T.S. Eliot reading “The Wasteland.” It's an urbane interpretation, rendered with the restraint of a mature dancer.

José was an inspiring colleague in the Portland, Oregon dance scene of the late seventies. In 1977, then a fledgling dance writer, I wrote a review of one of his solo performances for the (now-defunct) Portland Scribe. The piece ends, “He begins a demonic counting of an eight-beat phrase, pushing himself almost into a frenzy. Up into the air and down again — sometimes he doesn't even land on his feet. I wonder, how many lives does José Brown have, anyway?”

Dance is an ephemeral art. When the dancer/choreographer vanishes, what remains is the memory of the dancer, the memory of the dance. Since I began work on this article, interviewing some of his friends, reading his journals and letters, viewing videotapes of him dancing — I have been inspired and saddened, exasperated, elated, and amazed. Most of all, I have been haunted by the question, “What if?” As his beloved teacher Judy Massee put it, “José was really thinking about Big Things all the time. All the time. What if? What if some angel had really come with some big foundation grant? What if there had been a MacArthur grant for José?”

Program notes to Brown's last performance
The title of this program, “Soldiers,” was suggested to me by casting the I Ching. Soldiers at their worst are murderers and despots, and at their best they are defenders and liberators. In either case, a soldier risks his/her life in combat. Even a nonviolent soldier.

My dance and my life are one. This program is improvised solo dancing. I would like to offer a program of choreography and dancers, but my economic condition prohibits this.

Coincidentally, I am Black, Gay, Native American, and HIV positive. Technically I have AIDS as my T 4 cell count is 9. I have been HIV positive for over eleven years. I do not expect to die of AIDS but I have come close to dying of poverty. Poverty is the greatest danger to our nation and to the world. Political organization is the only way to power. I am too independent to stay in an organization. Religion has always been my support. I cannot give my faith a name any more than I can describe my dance in one word.

I dedicate this program to Judith Massee because she has remained my friend and encouragement and because of the significant contributions she has made to the world of dance.

Brown's own writing and the memories shared by his friends sketch a portrait — though incomplete — of a brilliant artist who is “coincidentally Black, Gay, Native American, HIV positive,” and who is also desperately poor in late twentieth century America. We can view José's life as both a bold adventure and a cautionary tale. He was an accomplished professional whose path embraced contradictions. He was ambitious and impractical, foolhardy and wise, humble and imperious. He risked enormous discomfort and insecurity to practice his art. It may well be that he didn't have a choice. As he said it himself, his dance and his life were one.

Akemi Masaki, a choreographer and dancer, first saw Brown dance in 1975 in Tokyo.
I was struck by his passion. Technique is very important but passion is more important. He had power and he knew how to control it. His movement was like “ice skating.” No one in Japan had ever seen anyone move like that. He danced to Michael Jackson music. A three-year old brought him flowers. He danced with her in his arms. He was a “sensation” in Tokyo.

George Cummings, Reed outdoor instructor: Cummings' first memory of Brown was in the Reed Commons.
He got up and started to dance. He was so fluid and beautiful. I was entranced. I was just fascinated watching him. So fluid and elegant. Young and vital.

Masaki
He was always running. He was moving so quickly. He hardly slept. Just two to three hours. It made me think he would have a short life. He lived dance.

Brown was born in Gary, Indiana, a blue-collar steel town, and went to Reed on a scholarship. His father died when he was seven, leaving him alone with his mother. Their relationship was never easy. “He was very lonely as child,” says Masaki. His mother refused to accept that her son was gay. Among Brown's spiritual, aesthetic, and political mentors were Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Martha Graham, Alvin Ailey, Bergman, Fellini, and Marcus Garvey.

Indeed, Brown had incredible loyalty to friends and they to him. Living as he often did, from hand to mouth, “the kindness of friends” bailed him out more than once. They loaned him money. He slept on the floors of their apartments. He did his share of menial jobs — dishwashing and clerking, telephone jobs, ushering at the Public Theater in New York. Homelessness was not just a fear, but often a reality.

Judy Massee first saw Brown in the Reed dance studio. They kept up a correspondence over the years, and she invited José back to Reed several times to teach workshops.

Judy Massee
He was beyond waiting tables. He needed an angel. He had a constant fear of being homeless. It's a shame how dancers who are independent choreographers are treated in this country.

Cummings
I would say that José was incapable of dealing with the physical world. He used and destroyed my record of Rachmaninoff's “Vespers.” He would pick up the needle and drop it onto the record over and over again. From his point of view, it was easier to drop the needle on the record. At times I was very angry with him. He borrowed things from me, and if he did, I never got them back in one piece — if I got them back at all. Everything he touched ended up in shreds. He was very hard on things. He paid them no attention. The refrigerator door handle was sticky with honey. That was how José lived. He created chaos.

Mark Johnson, Reed friend and classmate
José just seemed to have a faith that in leaping forward without an apparent plan, there would be arms there to receive him. And, from my distance, it so often seemed to be true... I find that my feelings now for him and about him are even stronger than they were when I was in touch with him.

In the spring of 1996 Brown came home to Portland to die, though he never admitted he was dying. He went there because there were people there who loved him, offered to help him, and urged him to leave New York. He arrived in February, staying first with choreographer and teacher Vin Marti and his wife Anna, then moving to the home of his friends Deborah Einbender, an artist, and Brian Heald, an architect. On March 26, he moved to Our House, an AIDS hospice.

Brian Heald
He was such a pain in the ass about food. At times you'd have to trick him. I talked to a friend, a chef, who'd cared for people with AIDS for a long time. I put the problem to him, “How do you get someone to eat when whatever they see on the plate is so unappealing?” He said, “Hunger begins with the eye. Food is actually a story. There's always a narrative people have behind their eating.”

So we'd take José to Nature's Foods. It was his dinner. He could preside. He could choreograph the meal. He would push the shopping basket, so he could lean on it. He'd tell us what to get, and we'd run around the store, come back asking, “Is this the right kind?” His requirements were very specific. The whole evening would be this meal. Then we'd come back and cook his supper. We'd try to get it right. We'd bring it to him about done. He'd say, “Yes, that'll do.” It was a whole production and he was the director. Then it came time in the story for him to take his role, time for him to pick up the fork and put some food in his mouth. It worked. Yes, it did.

It was good having him here. He was good company. It was stimulating to be around him. His perspective as a citizen of the planet was truly singular. I just can't imagine anybody else with his intelligence, his incredibly broad selfeducation. From reading, from travels. He'd been in Tehran just before the revolution. He'd been to Afghanistan. He went to India to make a presentation to Kalu Rinpoche on behalf of the Tibetan group here in Portland, which led to the Lama coming here to reside. José was the emissary and danced for Kalu Rinpoche, a special dance that was very well received. He had a great eye as a contemporary anthropologist. He was outside of everything. There was no scene that he was in anywhere that he wasn't on the outside of in some way. He was an astute political observer.

Heald
He talked about America as choosing the wrong dream. He'd run the whole thing out in dream terms. The heritage of vision, and letting it degrade instead of kicking it up to the next level. The vision of Thoreau and Whitman and Marcus Garvey — all the people who had great vision. He'd talk about it in those terms.

He had holes in his shoes and nowhere to live, yet he performed and taught all over the world — Amsterdam, Florence, Greece, Turkey, the Tibetan Opera Company in Dharamsala. He performed for the Queen of Denmark. He performed in Hamburg, Germany and in the Philippines and in Tokyo and in Copenhagen. How did he manage to do it all?

Einbender
To get started somewhere he would dance on the streets. He would gather a troupe from that act. He would just dance. Put a hat out. I remember him telling that's how he got started in Barcelona. First it was just him. And then there would be ten of them on the street. And then they'd get a studio. And then they'd rent a hall. And then they'd get a grant.

Heald
In Barcelona he was trying to put a performance together. He couldn't pay anybody. It was an ambitious piece and the dancers weren't quite good enough, but he'd shuffle things around and tweak it and provoke people in key ways to get them to come out how they needed to be. And in the middle of this — he needed the right costumes. And he saw in the window of a boutique some special dress. So he went into the boutique and told the woman that, for no charge, she could get her dresses shown in a live performance. So he gets the dresses. And of course the performance is totally bizarre. Two of the key people blow up at each other and don't show up, a big snafu, and he just goes and barrels ahead. The woman from the boutique came and José knew she'd be completely befuddled by the whole thing, but no less gave her the proper attention as a patron of the show. Just the gall that was required and the drive that he had to do these things...

Elizabeth Zimmer, critic, from a review in The Village Voice, September 15, 1987
Brown rings dazzling changes, shifting in mid-phrase from balletic poses to Graham genuflections, from Indian classical dance to the dreamy concentration of the Japanese artist who assumes you can see into his mind... Homo mobilis, an aboriginal dancer he carries in his muscles imprints of thousands of years, thousands of miles of journeying to be here now. The impact of his hour and a half of exploring is to restore my confidence in arte povera, in the simplicity of materials required to create theatrical magic.

Aron Faegre, Reed classmate
Part of José's brilliance was his willingness to approach and engage the chaos of the universe, at a time when chaos was a word of little meaning in our culture. Now we know that chaos creates El Niño and La Niña, which in turn perhaps drive all the world's climates. For José there was no distinct line between modern dance and jazz and Jimi Hendrix and Bach. José and I shared a dream early on, of creating a traveling modern circus — of dance and mime, of clowns and classical music. A month ago I saw the Canadian “Saltimbanco” circus, which landed here in Portland for a month along a contaminated vacant shore of the downtown Willamette River. It was in the spirit that José and I had imagined twenty-nine years ago. It was about entertaining people and surprising them and mesmerizing them. His dance did that too.

Vin Marti
José had a tremendous ability to make something happen out of nothing. He was true to his vision. José was the person who “saw” me. I'd only been dancing for six months. He said to me, “You're a performer.” He taught me without teaching me.

Cummings
José refused to take protease inhibitors. He said they made people sick. He never said to me, “I'm going to die.” He always denied it, in fact. He was determined to get better and carry on with his work. A few weeks before he died, he asked me to take him to Mt. Tabor. It was a warm sunny day. I parked about half way up, and then we walked on trails toward the top. José used a cane and moved very slowly. We stopped to rest several times and turned back without reaching the top. José was very pleased with what he had done. It was a beginning, he said. He was making his legs and lungs work again. We finished our excursion at a coffee shop. Both of us hoped that we would soon be able to walk on a beach at the coast. José wanted to go to the beach more than anywhere else. In the optimism of that afternoon, neither of us could have known that we would not walk together again. By the next weekend, he was bedridden permanently.

Marti
Talk about tilting at windmills. He was talking about his next performance while he was dying in the hospice.

Cummings
Seven of us, including Akemi, took José's ashes to Cannon Beach and scattered them in the Pacific Ocean at the mouth of Ecola Creek. José had planned to go there to perform a ceremony. He didn't tell anyone what it was.