Review: Ronald K. Brown’s Messages of Resilience

As anyone can see, dance is bodies in motion. The choreography of Ronald K. Brown is the kind that makes you feel this fact. I can’t watch his work, with its rich blend of African and American modern dance, sitting still. What happens onstage is so supple and alive, so irresistibly kinetic, that you might not notice how often Brown shows the opposite: still bodies, inert bodies lying on the ground or carried by others.

I noticed those inert bodies on Tuesday — when Brown’s company, Evidence, returned to the Joyce Theater — because I know that Brown is recovering from a stroke that left him partially paralyzed. The three pieces that the company presented are all at least 20 years old, so the images of immobility in them aren’t new — only newly resonant. They were there all along, giving ballast and depth to the qualities that make every Evidence program, including this one, healing and rejuvenating.

The current company is on the young side, with a high percentage of new and newish faces. Christopher Salango doesn’t just look like a younger version of the associate artistic director, Arcell Cabuag; he dances like him, assertively but without arrogance. Joyce Edwards is a powerhouse, grounded and explosive. They and the other fresh blood are supplemented by more seasoned guest artists: the former and returning Evidence members Shayla Alayre Caldwell and Randall Riley, both extraordinary, and the Alvin Ailey standout Daniel S. Harder.

The works on the program, as is common for Brown, carry explicit messages, sometimes in words. In “Ebony Magazine: To a Village” (1996), which addresses how Black people present themselves and how they are perceived, we hear women singing, “Do you see what I see?” and a man (Brown) delivering a sermon against superficiality, calling for prayer. In “Come Ye” (2002), we hear the voice of Nina Simone, also invoking the power of prayer and the struggle for peace, and we see footage of sit-ins and marches and civil rights heroes. Both Simone’s voice and the voice of Fela Kuti, whose songs are also on the soundtrack, say “Amen.”

But Brown’s choreography is also full of indirect meaning. There are the hands clasped humbly behind backs, the open hands, the open hips. There are the horizontal processions, the diagonal ones, the lines of dancers sweeping the stage in spirals that seem to cleanse it. There’s the way that those different organizations of stage space often coexist and appear to operate on different time scales, slower or faster, and the way that dancers keep joining from the wings, adding their voices. Above all, there is the rhythm, the layered grooves — the way that, as those heroic scenes in “Come Ye” play on the rear wall, the dancers keep riding the grooves, inexorably.

And alongside all of that abundant life, there is the moment in “Ebony Magazine” when a dancer (Harder in this program) lies down as if dead and the others gather around him. And there are the moments at the start and the end of “Upside Down” (1998) when a dancer (Harder again) lies down and the others lift and carry him off on their shoulders.

On Tuesday, I was sorry not to see Brown come onstage during the bows, as Cabuag did, to receive the grateful ovation and reassure us with his presence. But by that point, the dancers had already made clear that his work is in good hands.

Ronald K. Brown/Evidence

Through Sunday at the Joyce Theater; joyce.org.