The audience sits on both sides, the stage between them. Hand-drawn images ripple across the performance as wind instruments and five dancers navigate the space. “What We Ask of Flesh” was inspired by a poetry collection by Rameca Bingham-Richer. Its core, however, is personal. 

Sensing the Shift

Pictured left to right: Christal Brown and her mother, Jacqueline "Jackie" Brown 

On visits home to her small North Carolina town, Brown began noticing subtle differences in her mother’s mannerisms, small mistakes that those around her brushed off as ordinary signs of aging. Because her mother was so respected in the community, serving as Lenoir County commissioner, NAACP Secretary, and Black Caucus Treasurer, people were inclined to overlook apparent changes. However, Brown, who was living out of state, saw the changes from a different perspective. 

These were not “senior moments,” says Brown. They were early signs of vascular dementia.

Recognizing the diagnosis and stepping into caregiving would shape not only how Brown moved through the world, but also how she made dance.

Mapping Movement and Memory

Founded in 2004, INSPIRIT, Brown’s company, was created as a collaborative space where artists work together rather than compete. Brown and her company first premiered “What We Ask of Flesh” in November 2023 at The Mahaney Center for the Arts at Middlebury College, in Middlebury, Vermont. Since then, they have shared the work at Jacobs Pillow, The Boston Dance Complex, Old Dominion University, and, most recently, at Colby College. 

Currently, Brown teaches at Middlebury College and serves as INSPIRIT’s executive artistic director. She is also the founder of Project Becoming and chief visioning officer of Steps & Stages Coaching.

“I do a lot of things,” Brown said. “They’re actually all the same thing, they just have different outputs.”

Onstage, five dancers and two live musicians move through mapped structures that Brown describes as a kind of map. A media artist manipulates hand‑drawn images that appear and transform across the space as performers pass through different “portals” of experience. Wind instruments and percussion build a soundscape that shifts with the dancers.

Brown explains that the choreography unfolds like a quilt, with movement phrases stitched into patterns over time. She sees herself as the “choreographic architect”, building the framework while the performers and artists bring it all to life, adding color, nuance, depth. 

The concept of flesh is integral to the work's structure, encapsulating its vision as it explores the internal and external dimensions of human existence, including memory and movement.

Brown defines flesh as “the intermediary between the world and the soul” in relation to the work.

Flesh’s porous nature can be compared to a sponge. As Brown explains, “Everything that’s coming in, a little bit of it gets stuck.”

As she emphasizes, “You can’t clean a sponge. You can’t get all the germs out.”

Brown likens this to the experience of watching her mother “retool,” as she calls it, memories and thoughts rising to the surface without immediate context, yet carrying deep personal meaning.

This was one of the many realities Brown faced in her role as a caregiver, and it informs how the dancers move through the space, navigating internal and external realms.

Roles Reversed

After her mother’s diagnosis, Brown coordinated medical care, insurance, legal decisions, and daily logistics from another state. She flew back and forth, keeping “all the balls in the air,” while raising her child as a single parent and trying to stay connected to a community she no longer lived in day to day.

In a small town, where community perception shaped reality, others’ understanding of her mother’s decline was complicated and filtered through who she had been for so long. Without a strong support system to share the burden, Brown carried both the logistical demands and the emotional strain largely on her own.

With only one sibling and her father having passed away prior to her mother’s diagnosis, she sometimes wondered whether things might have been different in a larger family.

Brown also points to a broader cultural dynamic present in many Southern families, particularly in families of color, where crucial information is not always openly communicated, complicating the ability to provide care when the need arises.

She navigated Medicare and Medicaid, worked around doctors who didn’t always communicate directly with her, and managed legal and financial decisions as her mother’s condition progressed. As the matriarch of her family, the responsibility fell squarely on her.

As the tension between daughter and caregiver grew, Brown found herself navigating responsibilities that felt closer to those of an attorney or medical professional. There was no clear roadmap, no consistent way to measure whether the decisions she was making were the right ones.

She also came to understand how unpredictable the process could be.

“With a disease like this [dementia], everything can change in a moment,” she says. “There’s no rubric.”

A rubric wasn’t the only thing Brown was missing when stepping into the caregiver role. 

“I didn’t have the tools,” Brown says. “I was not equipped to grieve and care and be objective simultaneously.”

Years earlier, before her mother became seriously ill, Brown had experienced what she refers to as a deep premonition. Alone in her home, she was suddenly overcome with grief.

“I was on the floor, mourning my mother… and nothing had happened yet.” 

That experience, similar to anticipatory grief, helped her learn how to become objective about caregiving responsibilities. 

“This isn’t everybody’s pathway,” she says. “But I knew that the grief I had experienced before, I could put it to the side to do what needed to be done.”

And so she did. She organized, decided, and responded as needed. She kept things moving.

But something else proved harder to access in the moment.

“I could not see how to be closer to her in the moment of caring for her in a way that kept all the balls in the air, but also trying to step in and be closer to her heart at the same time.” 

That was the disconnect, the space between managing care and sustaining closeness. 

Love, Loss, and Legacy 

As her mother’s condition worsened, Brown watched the changes unfold in real time.

“I watched her kind of shut down piece by piece,” she says.

While she was still creating “What We Ask of Flesh,” her mother passed away. As she processed her loss, Brown found herself questioning whether she had done things right, until a close family friend offered words that cut through that uncertainty.

“You were a good daughter,” they told her.

“That was the only thing I needed,” Brown says. “That was the entire forgiveness for me… just to know that I did my best.”

For Brown, grief did not begin at a single moment. It unfolded alongside caregiving, appearing early, shifting over time, and continuing well beyond her mother’s death.

“Finding a different kind of compassion for myself and learning what was lacking in that situation, in my own character, in my own perspective, so that I can use it in different ways.”

She now carries that awareness into her teaching and her relationships with others.

“I use it in my teaching now, different levels of compassion of where people are, meeting people where they are, having compassion and a broader outlook of how they see their story, rather than trying to fit it into a box that makes me feel like I can help. All the ways that I think that when we are caring for loved ones with diseases, especially Alzheimer's and dementia, we start to feel helpless. And our helplessness actually breeds a larger gap between the reality of the illness and the reality of our love.”

That reframing now shapes how she moves through both her work and her personal life.

Looking ahead, Brown is already thinking about what this experience will mean for her own son. She wants to make things clearer for him: to communicate her wishes, organize important documents, and ease the burden of navigating logistics and grief simultaneously.

“I don’t want him to be caught in that flux of, am I doing the right thing? Or am I grieving?” she says. “I don’t want that to be meshed up in the process of letting me go.”

It has also reshaped how she speaks to others in a caregiver role. 

“What I would tell other caregivers,” she says, “is to give the person in front of you permission to change, and to give yourself permission not to understand. To know that you might not always be able to fix it, but just your presence, being there, is part of discovering what might come next for both of you.”

This forward-looking awareness carries directly into her artistic practice. Brown hopes “What We Ask of Flesh” offers people a way to gesture toward experiences that are difficult to articulate, opening space for dialogue when words fall short.

In that way, her work becomes an extension of her grief—one that invites others into reflection, connection, and possibility.

Brown hopes people walk away with the following: “the idea that they can see things different, be different, and love different.”

Whether you are a person with the disease, a caregiver, a researcher, a doctor, or an advocate, the Alzheimer’s Association is here to support you. 

Resources

• Alzheimer’s Association 24/7 Helpline 800.272.3900

• 10 Healthy Habits for Your Brain 

• Support groups

• Educational programs