Interview: Camille A. Brown’s Road From Queens to Hell’s Kitchen

Camille A. Brown is a multi-talented dancer and choreographer who has created her own unique path to success. As a young artist, she worried she did not have the right body type to be a professional dancer, eventually proving that belief to be flawed. Creating her own dance company, Brown developed and executed a vision on her own terms. On Broadway, she received Tony nominations for Choir Boy and for colored girls, and now is grooving to the music of Alicia Keys as choreographer of Hell’s Kitchen at the Shubert Theatre. Here, Brown tells us about her own life in the Big Apple and how that helped her forge a path of her own making.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

How much of your own upbringing in New York City inspired your work on Hell’s Kitchen?
Oh, all of it. That’s what was one of the main draws about joining this show. I have a history. I started taking the subway when I was 13. I walked all over Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan. The birth of hip-hop is here! I have all of that in, I call it my blood memory. It was about accessing the history of my history, and what I’ve experienced in my life, and the gestures and interactions that I see. I put a lot of myself in my own work in my company too. It always starts from a personal place and then it transfers to other people.

Why did you choose dance?
My mom introduced me to dance and I loved it. She loved musical theater and she wanted to make sure that I was surrounded by the arts. I learned the clarinet, gymnastics, swimming, and dance. Dance was the one thing that when I came into the room, she said I lit up. When I grew up, there was no internet. We went to the library and we would take out some of her favorite musicals and watch the dance sequences over and over and I would start learning them.

I still have a small voice, but 30 years ago it was even higher. I would get teased a lot and I was always afraid in class to participate. It’s not that I didn’t know the answers, I didn’t feel safe in terms of expressing myself through my voice in that way because I would get teased. So, dance was a way for me to create a safe space where I could express my joy, my pain, my happiness, my sadness, all in one and it would be okay.

How did you get started professionally?
One of my friends got a tape of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater doing Ronald K. Brown’s Grace and it shifted my whole perspective of movement. It was so beautiful. It was a mixture of African and modern dance and it just felt like, “wow, I would love to know whoever choreographed this. I would love to dance with them.”

After I graduated college, one of my friends told me that Ron was looking for a woman to join his company, so I contacted him and he invited me into a dance class. A couple of days after that, he asked me to be in the company. I danced with them for five seasons.

What were the hurdles you overcame?
As I got older, I was introduced to this question of what is the ideal body and what does a dancer look like? I have teachers that I call my angels. They’ve been with me from the beginning, but then I had other teachers that made me think something was wrong with me. With the help of a lot of my teachers and mentors, I was able to push through. A lot of people think body image and the issues that happen within the dance world are associated with ballet. But there is an issue and a conversation that needs to continue about how we are conditioning our students, our dancers, to think about their bodies.

Is there a specific Camille A. Brown style?
Whether it’s tv, film, opera, or Broadway, I always go in asking “What is the story we’re trying to tell?” I don’t go into each differently, but I understand that each one has its own process and I have to shift the way I work, even though I always am myself in each one. I always try to approach something with the story, the arc, and the mood in mind.

People have told me that they know it’s me when they see my work, which I’m so thrilled by. I’ve tried hard to develop my voice and I’ve been doing it for over 20 years now, so I’m hopefully showing that I can do a step dance. I can do a modern dance. I can do a jazz dance. I can do a hip-hop dance. But it all looks like Camille, and it’s all inspired by my experiences, and how I see things through my lens.