On Saturday night at Lincoln Center Out of Doors, the singer-songwriter Stew was joined by his band, the Negro Problem, and a mixed-race chorus of precociously cool high school kids. His messy set of songs established how sharp-edged satire about race (among other topics) could be at once witty and warmhearted, expressing confusion with ease. Then came the difficult part, the dance half of the evening: “Mr. TOL E. RAncE” by the choreographer Camille A. Brown.
Ms. Brown’s hugely ambitious 50-minute work takes on the slippery subject of stereotypes and the metaphorical mask that black entertainers have had to wear. Her references, flashed in video projections and in body language, range back to silent movies and extend into today. The story she tells isn’t one that has yet ended.
Nor is the story new. Ms. Brown has done her homework. Her program notes acknowledge W. E. B. DuBois, Mel Watkins’s book “On the Real Side” (1994) and Spike Lee’s film “Bamboozled” (2000). Her production offers no original ideas, and her satire, compared with Mr. Lee’s or that of Dave Chappelle (another cited influence), is dull. Yet Ms. Brown’s approach is distinctive in situating the problem in bodies and in making it personal.
As the pianist Scott Patterson plays a score like an accompaniment to a silent movie, seven animated dancers, including the choreographer, sample gestures from the distant past — shucking and jiving, hot feet, comic mugging — but also from the twerking and crotch-grabbing of the present and a great deal in between. Weaving all this together adeptly, Ms. Brown suggests equivalence, too indiscriminately. More compellingly, she presents the inner experience of black entertainers as schizophrenic.
In one solo, Waldean Nelson shifts between images of blackness with the intensity of a man possessed by demons. In the final solo, Ms. Brown, a vivid performer, sums up the whole piece in her physical struggle against deflation. Trying to escape the mask, “Mr. TOL E. RAncE” makes viscerally clear, is exhausting.
But so is “Mr. TOL E. RAncE.” The alternation between manic speed and forlorn slowness grows tiresome, and Act II, though it differs from Act I in letting the performers speak, essentially reiterates the same points.
Intending to honor her predecessors by projecting their images and sampling their moves, Ms. Brown reproduces their predicament, mocks them and mourns them, but cannot reclaim their ease. Her piece replicates the old trap: When people laugh and applaud, are they laughing and applauding for the right reasons? Her only way out is Act III, a moderated discussion between performers and audience. That the discussion in Damrosch Park on Saturday was predictable doesn’t make it less necessary.