ABOUT
Skate Truth to Power
Mission: Brownbody exists to liberate Black artistry through dance, theater, and figure skating
What we do
Brownbody affirms the complexity, beauty, vulnerability, strength, resilience, fatigue, fear, honesty, humility, and magic that have and continue to characterize historic and contemporary journeys of so many U.S. based Black communities. It accomplishes this through our donation based learn to skate lessons, community dialogues and interactive workshops, and boundary breaking artistic work that blends multiple artistic genres including figure skating, modern dance, social justice practice, theater, and live and recorded soundscapes.
Through our programming we witness, reflect, dialogue, dance, and heal as we assess if our perspectives stem from destructive historic ideologies and learn how to disempower these belief systems leading to self-defined nourishing change. We offer a donation based learn to skate program, the presentation of artistic work on and off of the ice, a community dialogues/interactive workshops.
Brownbody presents artistic work both on and off of the ice. Brownbody prioritizes representation and is fortunate to work with an all Black cast of professional skaters for its on ice artistic work.
Join us for our 7-week Learn to Skate lessons taught by Brownbody instructors and assistants. No experience required.
Brownbody’s goal with these lessons is to offer a learn to skate experience for youth and adults from Black and Brown communities that centers blackness in the curriculum, format, and structure of the lessons.
Who we are
Deneane Richburg is the founder and Artistic Director of Brownbody. As the creative home for Richburg’s choreographic work, through Brownbody, she honors the complex narratives of U.S. based Black diasporic communities by taking participants on journeys that disrupt assumptions, ideologies, and disenfranchising popular narratives around blackness. As a modern dance choreographer and former competitive figure skater, Richburg is interested in pushing the boundaries of creative expression on the ice via engaging these narratives as a framework in which somatic based movement exploration occurs. Richburg blends different movement worlds and creates work for both the ice and the stage.
Deneane grew up a competitive figure skater—spending time in spaces where she felt she had to check her racial/cultural identity at the door, as the world of competitive skating was immersed in an ideology that excluded her ancestry’s truths. Working and growing in this space, to quote Zora Neale Hurston, she always felt “most colored when [she was] thrown against a sharp white background.” As she got older, she realized she needed to carve out a space for herself and her ancestral history hence her decision to create Brownbody. Richburg received her MFA in dance and choreography from Temple University in 2007, an MA in Afro-American Studies from UW Madison, and a BA in English and African American Studies from Carleton College. Working with Lela Aisha Jones, Richburg was also the Co-founder of The Requisite Movers, a Philadelphia based program that supports the work of Black female choreographers. Deneane has danced for a number of artists including, Chris Walker, Jose Francisco Barroso, Dr. Kariamu Welsh, Lela Aisha Jones and has performed with Off Leash Area, Flyground, and Kariamu and Company. Richburg is a grateful recipient of a 2017 McKnight Choreography Fellowship, administered by the Cowles Center, funded by The McKnight Foundation, a 2019 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, and a Dance/USA Fellowship to Artists made possible with generous funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.
Lela Aisha Jones is the Associate Artistic Director of Brownbody. Lela is an artist scholar, movement performance artist, interdisciplinary collaborator and founder of Lela Aisha Jones | FlyGround, her creative home. A proud native of Tallahassee, FL, she feels quite fortunate to live and make dance in Philadelphia, PA. Lela’s work intimately intertwines personal and collective lived experiences of diasporic blackness as archived in and excavated with the body through dance.
Lela’s most recent choreographic and performance endeavors include Same Story Different Countries Project in Johannesburg and Cape Coast, South Africa (2017) directed by Dr. Lynnette Overby, Nia Love’s g(1)host: lost at sea at Gibney Dance (2019), Onye Ozuzu’s work at Dance Gathering in Lagos, Nigeria (2019), and a commissioned presentation of her work Plight Release and the Diasporic Body at the African Afmerican Museum of Philadelphia with, and in response to, the work of visual artist and scholar Fahamu Pecou (2019). Some of her most influential professional experiences have been in movement practice with Nia Love, Christal Brown | Inspirit, Barak Ade Sole, Moustapha Bangoura, Anssumane Silla, Sulley Imoro, Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, and Urban Bush Women.
Lela earned a B.S. in Health Science Education from the University of Florida, an M.F.A. in dance from Florida State University, a Ph.D. from Texas Woman’s University, and is a new member of the dance faculty at Bryn Mawr College. Her doctoral work was focused nomadic/migrating identities, diasporic citizenship, as well as collective philosophies and practices of integrity in Black and African diasporic dance teaching, choreography, and performance.
Her awards and honors include a 2015 Leeway Foundation Transformation Award and a 2016 Pew Fellowship in the Arts. Lela is grateful to continue her work as an artist scholar, movement performance artist, and interdisciplinary collaborator with Brownbody and as a member of the faculty in the Bryn Mawr College Dance Program.
OUR BOARD
Ramona Wilson, Chair
Ramona Wilson is a supplier diversity professional with concentrations in finance, human resources, procurement, legislation, budget, and community relations. As Knutson Construction’s diversity director, Ramona Wilson, is a board member and passionate champion for the National Association of Minority Contractors (NAMC). Ramona was presented with the “Advocate of the Year” award for her unrelenting commitment to helping the NAMC members secure projects within the construction industry. Some of Ramona’s honors include: receiving a Women of Excellence award, being recognized as one of the top 100 Women Impacting Supplier Diversity by Women Enterprise USA, being recognized as a corporate member of the year by the National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO) and being recognized as a Corporate Woman Achiever by the National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO).
Michelle Gibbs, Vice Chair
Michelle Corwin Gibbs, Ph.D. is assistant professor of Theater at St. Olaf College where she directs and teaches courses in beginning and advanced acting, script analysis, and introduction to theater. Her scholarly research interests include a spectrum of interdisciplinary studies in Black performance and performativity and critical identity studies in and around The New Negro movement in early 20th century Black modernist theatre. As a solo performance artist, Michelle uses her body as a site for inquiry into how Black racialization and Black female sexualization manifest into performances of affect – teetering between the spaces of tragic/comical and repulsive/alluring. Michelle received a Ph.D. in Theatre from Bowling Green State University, an M.F.A. in Acting from the University of California, Irvine, and a B.A. in Theatre Performance from Western Michigan University.
Alvena Richburg
Alvena has been Brownbody board member for the past 6 years. She has 25 years experience as an Accounting Specialist and is currently employed with the State of Minnesota. Alvena is also a highly skilled step and line dancer. She enjoys teaching, stepping and line dancing with Minnesota’s own Command Steppers.
Sean Phillips
seangarrison (Sean G Phillips) is a native Detroiter currently residing in Minneapolis, MN. He is a writer and Abstract painter (studio and performative) in which both disciplines cross-influence the other. He is a self-taught painter who is committed to using his talent in part to edify humanity. He enjoys visual art in its entirety; but abstract art’s ability to elicit different responses to “what it is” intrigues him as no answer, in his opinion, is essentially wrong. He wants those who see his work to see themselves through their life’s lens and be able to dream.
Kathy Hedin
Kathy Hedin has over 20 years of experience in local government, focusing on
administration, human services, and public health. She excels in building and
maintaining collaborative teams, strategic visioning, and effective operations for large
departments. Hedin is skilled in community engagement, team building, and emergency
incident management. She collaborates across sectors to develop innovative programs,
policies and initiatives that enhance community wellbeing and safety. Hedin has a track
record of promoting and establishing equity, inclusion, and justice. She currently serves
as the Assistant City Manager of External Services including the departments of Parks
and Recreation, Public Health, Public Works and Community Development at the City of
Bloomington. Hedin previously served as Deputy County Manager in Ramsey County.
Monica Lash
Monica has been volunteering for the Learn to Skate Program at Brownbody for the past 5 years. Monica is currently employed as Paralegal at Moss and Barnett in Minneapolis and previously worked TCF for over 30 years as an AVP in Retail Lending. Monica enjoys making organic soap and sewing in her free time when she is not traveling to Minnesota State University Mankato to visit her daughter Avery who is a hockey cheerleader. Avery also is a Brownbody coach, when time allows.
Our History
Blending modern dance, theater, social justice and skating since 2007, Brownbody brings stories/topics important to diasporic communities from the peripheries of mainstream consciousness to “center stage” thereby making the ice welcoming to communities of color. Founded by Deneane Richburg in 2007, Brownbody received its 501c3 in 2013. And has presented work for both the stage and the ice including:
The Most Perfect Human Specimen (part of 2009’s Being Branded at UMN’s Ridder Ice Arena) about Saartjie Baartman, South African Khoi Khoi woman, exhibited/exploited in 1800s Europe.
Living Past (Re)memory, a stage work based on Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
Waiting For You… (Highland Ice Arena, St. Paul) on ice Afro-modern dance production.
Quiet As It’s Kept (Victory Memorial Ice Arena, Mpls) which was created with celebrated MN actress/vocalist, Thomasina Petrus, and incorporated excerpts of Ida B. Wells speeches (received a Sage Award for the performance) to explore this country’s history of lynching and racial oppression during reconstruction as a means to understand its residual impact on our modern American lives.
Brownbody presented CoMotion, a multi-month series of collaborative events exploring issues on race, culture, history and community, with donation-based skating lessons; a public discussion “Black, Brown, and Native Bodies in Performance,” master dance classes and a leadership workshop led by internationally renowned Urban Bush Women (UBW). CoMotion culminated with
Brownbody produced and performed in The Requisite Movers/Twin Cities, a production that combined three female Black choreographers’ works (Richburg’s, Lela Aisha Jones | FlyGround from Philadelphia, and Rondo native Leslie Parker), centering multiple perspectives on Black histories, with personal journeys navigating racism today.
