Camille A. Brown: Mr. TOL E. RAncE

photo courtesy of Duke Performances

Camille A. Brown

There is an undeniable tenderness in Mr. TOL E. RAncE, the 2012 work that began Camille A. Brown’s trilogy of evening-length works, which concludes the choreographer’s season-long residency at Duke Performances this weekend. We easily sense the love in its acts of retrieval and remembrance, as Brown’s dancers move in tandem with long-dead performers seen in rare footage from the previous century. But the work is just as undeniably a sharp, sometimes scathing work of cultural criticism that closely analyzes a cavalcade of reductive—but socially accepted—representations of African Americans, from the era of minstrelsy (once the most popular form of public entertainment in America) to modern mass media. As Brown’s dancers take on those physical vocabularies, the mask made manifest by poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar slips, and we witness the toll it takes on performers coerced into all but intolerable roles. —Byron Woods