If all goes according to the grand design of Evidence founder Ronald K. Brown, those attending Tuesday's performance by the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based dance troupe will come away "lifted up, feeling their potential and knowing everything is possible if we're open."
Brown founded the company in 1985 to celebrate the ritual and journey of dance as well as to "promote understanding of the human experience in the African Diaspora through dance and storytelling," according to the website.
Each dance, he said, begins with an idea and then is followed by images. "Then I try to dance those images out."
Evidence will perform in Chattanooga as part of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga's Patten Performance Series. The dancers will feature three pieces: "Ise (My Heart)"; "Incidents, A Woman's Piece"; and "On Earth Together."
"Incidents" derives its title from "Incident in the Life of a Slave Girl" by Harriet Jacobs.
"The idea for the piece was to trace how slave trade lives in women's bodies," he said, and to look at how women carry themselves.
Growing up in Brooklyn, Brown saw his grandmother become surrogate mother and guardian to children in the neighborhood.
"Everyone on the block called her Momma Brown," she said, "the way she took care of kids."
Another incident, he said, is observing the set of women's faces on the bus in Brooklyn or the pointedness with which, he said, people won't look others in the eye on the street.
"I was curious about this kind of thing, how it still existed in people's bodies."
His goal, he said, was to identify how the same feelings are manifested in history and today.
"Ise" (Ee-say), named for a Nigerian village, also translates to "My heart, my love," or "I love you the way God loves me," Brown said.
He created three parallel journeys, depicting families from Cuba, West Africa and America, and used poetry by Nikki Giovanni, "My Father's House."
"The poem is a metaphor of her preparing her house for her husband," he said, "but also God's house. So the metaphor is these three spiritual traditions headed toward the same destination."
A different section of "Ise," called "Release," is set to "Release Your Heart" by spoken-word artist Ursula Rucker.
"That's when you see the three spiritual traditions all come together," he said. "Because we all want to make the world a better place, we all want to bring love to it."
The final piece, "On Earth Together," features music by Stevie Wonder.
"His music is about having compassion for the world," said Brown, "but how do we understand that?"
The piece expresses an acknowledgment of ancestral lines and of the "space they have prepared for us," Brown said, as well as recognition and mourning of chaos in the world. The resolution of the work, he said, is about letting go of blame. "In an argument," he said, "the best position to take is to listen."