African-American folk memories are vivid in the work of Ronald K Brown, and there is a brave absence of condescension or correctness in his company's attempts to inhabit their past. During the opening suite of dances, High Life, the choreography migrates from a slave auction (a snapshot as witty in its brevity as it is angry) to a crowd of 21st-century clubbers. En route Brown takes in a tender, shuffling church meeting, a Harlem dance floor and a pair of sunny African dances.
The members of Brown's company Evidence assume their ancestors' guises with engaging conviction. Though all are professionally honed dancers (and Brown himself is a thoroughbred), the company boasts a mix of personalities, and bodies that could have walked on stage direct from the street.
Brown's vocabulary is equally persuasive. While he inflects each episode with details of period and place, his basic style is a sophisticated and very watchable hybrid of west-African dance and hip-hop. With a power base inherited from both - vibrant torso and hunkered-down stamps - Brown launches a rhythmic dazzle of footwork and a finely calibrated whirl of arms.
The dancers' stamina is awesome; it is unfortunately Brown's invention that fails to last the evening. Not only is the episodic format of High Life blandly repeated in the next two works - the spiritually aspirational Walking out the Dark and the politically rousing Come Ye - but the dancing doesn't really change. The music and the costumes may shift the message, but the choreography fails to give it flesh.
This matters most in Come Ye. Nina Simone and Fela Anikulapo Kuti's music make heroes of the company as they surf its rhythms, and added video footage of black oppression and black power whips the audience into an emotional ovation. But it hits a false note: despite his fine intentions, Brown is trading on energy and sentiment not on his own choreography.
