BARRY BRANNUM / CASEY BROWN – Overnite

To it, with it, through it, about it and within it and beyond it. It’s not that dance and music have split up; they’re just reevaluating their relationship. OVERNITE imagines some of the worlds that lay hidden in musical structures and experiences. The two dances make room for what’s personal about our desires to embody sound, what’s frustrating about it, and what larger insights we might unearth in our encounter with beats and grooves.

Barry Brannum’s “Blood Blood Blood” was born sometime in the days after disco. Can you feel the music / taking control? It grew out of questions concerning bodily rhythms and their entanglement with the sparkling viscerality of music made for sweating. It wants to ask, in the present, how early house music moved, and continues to move, hope and fear—send me up higher / come with desire.

Casey Brown’s “UP.BEAT.DOWN” is about Velcro-like adherence—to the music, to the score, to the space, and to each other. Three majorettes move in unison, dividing their bodies to accumulate different canons in different limbs, producing a celestial folk dance of kaleidoscopic angles and images. The majorettes compose, with their bodies, a score not unlike a techno song: metronomic and trancelike. This dance is about being together and not being together.

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Barry Brannum is a dance artist and PhD candidate in UCLA’s World Arts & Cultures / Dance department. His artistic and academic projects explore the shifting relationship between black American dancers’ artistic and everyday selves in the choreographic process. Barry has worked with a number of choreographers during his time in LA, including Ann Carlson, Alison D’Amato, Dorothy Dubrule, Lionel Popkin, alexx makes dances (Alexx Shilling), Nickels Sunshine, and Kevin Williamson. He recently toured as a guest artist with Cullberg Ballet as part of Deborah Hay’s project Figure a sea. When he isn’t dancing or studying, Barry is probably baking or communing with the Internet.

Casey Brown is a choreographer and dancer. Her creative work marries deep introspection with drama and design. Considering the phrase, “you are what you see,” her work over the past three years has concerned itself with creating an aesthetic that reflects what she sees— and what others see when they look at her. This aesthetic draws from the visual and emotional landscape of her hometown, Orlando, including football games, cheerleading, old school jazz, Burdines, animatronics, and ballet. She is grateful to have presented her work at various venues, including UCLA’s Kaufman Theater, the Electric Lodge, the McCarter Theater in New Jersey, and, currently, at Highways. Casey is honored to have worked as a long-term collaborator for choreographers Rayven Armijo of Cuerva Urban Folklorico and Chantal Cherry. Casey holds an M.F.A. in Dance from UCLA’s World Arts and Cultures/Dance Department as well as an A.B. in English from Princeton with certificates in Dance and Creative Writing. As a student of dance she is grateful to have performed works by Victoria Marks, Jeanine Durning, Melinda Ring, Maria Hassabi, Lea Anderson, Kyle Abraham, Raja Feather Kelly, Zvi Gotheiner, Trisha Brown, Bill T. Jones, Deganit Shemy, Doug Varone, Elisa Zuppini, and Karen Rosenberg. She is also a member of the Brazilian Zouk dance community in Los Angeles.