Ronald K. Brown / Evidence, A Dance Company will be performing a pair of programs in November at BRIC (photo © Ayodele Casel)
BRIC Arts | Media House
647 Fulton St.
November 12-22, $16-$27
718-683-5600
bricartsmedia.org
www.evidencedance.com
In an interview ten years ago, Ronald K. Brown told me, “I want everyone to dance.” A decade later, the Brooklyn native is still fulfilling that desire as he comes to the end of a three-year residency at BRIC with his immensely talented troupe, Evidence, A Dance Company. As part of the residency, which included free community dance classes, as well as the thirtieth anniversary of the company, Evidence will be performing two programs this month at BRIC in downtown Brooklyn, right next to BAM’s Harvey Theater. The first program, being held November 12-14, consists of Two-Year Old Gentlemen, with live music by Mamadouba Mohamed Camara; the “Clear as Tear Water” solo from Truth Don Die; the “March” duet from Lessons; and Water, featuring text written and performed by Cheryl Boyce Taylor. Brown and Taylor will join in a post-show discussion with moderator Eva Yaa Asantewaa following the November 13 performance. The second program, November 19-22, includes Walking Out the Dark, with music by Philip Hamilton, and Why You Follow/Por Que Sigues, a work originally commissioned for Cuba’s Malpaso Dance Company. It is always a treat to see Brown and his infectious smile, whether performing, talking about his work, his travels, and his community, or teaching classes; he has a genuine love of life and dance, and that shows through in his dazzling choreography.
In Daddy Don’t Go, making its world premiere this week at DOC NYC, director and producer Emily Abt takes a unique look at single-parent households, focusing on four New York men attempting to raise their children without their mothers. “Being the product of a fatherless household, Daddy Don’t Go delves into an issue that’s close to my heart,” executive producer Omar Epps explains on the film’s Kickstarter page. “The media inundates us with the notion that men from impoverished areas are absent fathers but meanwhile there are millions of men fighting to be active in their children’s lives.” Daddy Don’t Go follows four such men as they battle the odds to succeed. Nelson AKA “Macho” Serrano is a former Latin King from the South Bronx, living with Rebecca, who has two kids from different fathers and now a third with the twenty-six-year-old Nelson, himself a product of the foster-care system whose mother was a coke addict and who has never met his father. “I’m my own father now,” he says. Omar Kennedy, a thirty-four-year-old father of three, is on disability in the North Bronx, trying to raise his kids without their mothers; one mother physically abused her two children with Kennedy, while the mother of his other child is in prison. One of his daughters, Milagros, suffers from a severe mental disorder that occasionally requires extended hospitalization. “As much as I’ve been trying to hold everything together, it’s like it’s slipping away from me,” he notes. Roy Puntervold is a twenty-eight-year-old Long Island man with a young son, Caiden, whose mother is still a party girl, unable to fulfill her duties as a parent, so he is raising the boy with his own mother and father while attending Forestdale’s Fathering Initiative so he can become a better dad. He is having difficulty finding a job because of a jail stint when he was a troubled teenager. “Not everything’s always what it seems,” he says, pointing out how hard it is, even with the support he’s getting from his folks. And twenty-six-year-old Alexander Charles Jr. is fighting the system as he takes classes to become an automotive technician while raising his young child in Harlem; the boy’s mother was declared unfit to be a parent. “I told myself, I’m not going to be no deadbeat father,” he says. “For me to be a deadbeat father, I gotta be dead, and somebody gotta beat me up for me to be a deadbeat. I’m not letting that happen.”
When old man Fletcher (Danny Glover) takes off for a week, leaving Mike (Mos Def) in charge of his soon-to-be-demolished video store called Be Kind Rewind (they don’t have any DVDs or recent movies), his most important rule is to “Keep Jerry Out.” Jerry (Jack Black) is a crazy conspiracy theorist who covers himself in metal to ward off alien rays. After a botched attack on the local power plant, Jerry becomes a walking magnet (in a laugh-out-loud hysterical scene) and unknowingly erases all the videos in the store. Taking a page from the Little Rascals plots when Spanky and Alfalfa would suddenly put on a show for some local cause, Mike and Jerry recruit Alma (Melonie Diaz) as they proceed on their very strange attempts at Sweding — making their own versions of such films as Ghostbusters, Rush Hour 2, and Robocop and renting them out as if they were the real thing. Following the brilliant Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the extremely strange The Science of Sleep, writer-director Michel Gondry has fashioned a really stupid movie that has an overabundance of heart and charm. Glover and Mos Def are soft and gentle in this Capra-esque comedy, offsetting Black’s hyperactivity. Every time you’re ready to write the film off as being just too silly and ridiculous, something comes along to make you double over in laughter. Be Kind Rewind kicks off the Museum of the Moving Image series “Walkers: Hollywood Afterlives in Art and Artifact,” being held in conjunction with the