"Black girlhood" is not a term you hear in everyday conversation. Even among youth workers, educators, and researchers, Black girlhood has historically been an illegible demographic of interest. In fact, Black girls themselves struggle to be seen and heard within a US social landscape that finds it difficult to locate full subjectivities at the intersection of race, gender, and age when those subjectivities are considered non-normative. There is a language, a lexicon even, to talk about Black boys and the issues that impact their lives. This is, perhaps, most clearly evident in policy discourse and the grammar of criminalization. Girlhood studies, generally speaking, has carved out a space from which to understand what it means to be in the state of becoming an adult while navigating the trickiness of gender and its attendant social performances. However, Girlhood Studies has tended to center primarily on experiences most relevant to white middle-class girls and young women. Beyond the realms of policy and research, Black girls most often take shape in popular culture as caricatures of hypersexuality and aggression, or victimization. In other words, they are illegible in the "real" world and exaggerated stock figures within mainstream media where they are seen as either threats to or threatened by the multiple communities they occupy.

Choreographer Camille A. Brown's latest ballet, Black Girl: Linguistic Play (BGLP), transforms the anemic and unsatisfactory terms through which Black girlhood is conceived. Brown achieves this socially relevant and politically courageous artistic feat by shifting the origin of the gaze. BGLP is interested in the stories Black girls tell about themselves, not the ones told about them. BGLP illuminates the complexity of living as a Black girl, not the simplicity of reading a Black girl's body.

Camille A. Brown has never been afraid to challenge norms and standards. Her provocative evening-length dance theater work, Mr. TOL E. RAncE, compels the audience to not just watch but experience the nuances of Black performance on and off stage. Brown interrogates the "mask" or socially acceptable demeanor Black people are socialized to wear as a form of protection in a hostile world, as well as the ways Black performers develop their own commentary on the "mask" and the stereotypes that inevitably emerge from its misuse and misreading. Mr. TOL E. RAncE won a 2014 Bessie Award for Outstanding Production.

In a phone interview I conducted with Brown, she said that Mr. TOL E. RAncE and Black Girl: Linguistic Play are "in conversation with one another." She continued, "Mr. TOL E. RAncE presents stereotypes, while Black Girl: Linguistic Play provides strategies for living through stereotypes." In this way, it is useful to understand BGLP as not just an intervention in the conventions of concert dance or in Black Girlhood, but as an innovative methodology for living. It is difficult to overstate the importance of art that is, at turns, emotionally moving and aesthetically arresting, while also providing a template for what it could look like to move in the world as one's full, unapologetic self.

The idea for Black Girl: Linguistic Play emerged from many viewers' questions after watching Mr. TOL E. RAncE: What does it mean to constantly have to wear a mask and master the art of flipping that mask, depending on context and present company? What does it mean to live through a twenty-first-century version of W. E. B. Du Bois's concept of double consciousness? What do we do about this? Black Girl: Linguistic Play mines the rich terrain of Black girls' embodied performance in everyday life in order to narrate a physical and affective tapestry of movement stories that transform double consciousness into a consciousness of Black girls' interiority. Black girls' unique perspective on themselves and their place in the world does not require external comparisons or validation in order to represent their truths. Brown knows that when Black girls are simply being—playing in their neighborhoods with one another, trying on different identities, learning themselves, and then sharing the fantastically flawed nature of these experimental selves—they can show us all how to live. "Be yourself" is a suspect mandate when that self is often ignored or pathologized. Actually attempting to live that mandate is a powerful act of liberation, even when the social and political consequences of "being yourself" may suggest otherwise.

Brown began developing BGLP by reading texts such as The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop by ethnomusicologist Kyra D. Gaunt and crafting movement sequences inspired by Black girls' hand-clapping games and double Dutch. Although Brown's dancers hail from a variety of locations within the African diaspora and had diverse experiences growing up, there was a common thread within all of their childhood memories that carried similar rituals of play and self-making. It is these rituals that allow Brown to identify in her work a distinctive culture of Black Girlhood that is embodied, shared, passed on, and transformed in daily practice. Black Girl: Linguistic Play is Camille A. Brown's divine intervention in Black girls' and Black women's relationship with themselves.

This full evening-length ballet features an all-woman cast and is comprised of three duets. The opening duet, between Camille and Catherine Foster (Cat), is a study in Black girl rituals of space making and space claiming. The two dance with the ease and beauty of girls who can confidently take up room in their homes and neighborhoods, because these are the spaces that, for better or worse, grew them. There is a floor to ceiling blackboard upstage left that partially covers the brick wall backdrop. Words and images written in colorful chalk by the dancers themselves cover the entire board. Camille and Cat fly across the stage on four raised platforms of varying heights. The precision in their intricately rhythmic movement is exhilarating. They take an almost irreverent type of care with their bodies and how they move in them. Is there such a thing as strategic freedom? I see it sometimes in the movements and voices of pairs and trios of teenage Black girls in public. I don't know that I've ever felt it until now. This is serious play.

Camille stops to turn her face and then extend her arm to the sky. Still looking up, she touches her hair and the side of her jawline, angling her head to get a better glimpse of herself in one of the seven mirrors affixed to the ceiling. In that moment and in the others that follow where the dancers shift their gaze, expand their chest, float an arm, or extend their fingers upward, looking for themselves and ultimately seeing their self-defined humanity becomes an exalted act.

At a point in her solo before Cat's entrance, Camille takes a piece of chalk in her hands and rubs her palms together to create a cloud of white dust. The dust dances with the stage lights to create an illuminated halo that briefly encircles Camille. But then, she moves again and the cloud is at her feet, dust trailing her in syncopated puffs that keep time with her feet. As the piece progresses through two more solos, the play in and on chalk continues.

Beatrice Capote and Fana Fraser guide us through a duet that starts from a place of giddy girlhood innocence to the futile competitions we stage within our own bodies and against ourselves, just as much with one another, in a quest to feel beautiful, sensual, seen. Throughout this duet, Beatrice and Fana break each other's hearts and ours, piece them back together again, and then dance along the cracks they can't meld back together. The duet takes the pair back to the blackboard, where they slam themselves against the board, backs to the wall. They hold onto one another and squirm out of the other's grasp, all the while sliding, dipping, and falling along the board. The flat, immobile wall forces a two-dimensionality that Beatrice and Fana fight against through every movement and gesture they make. The wall is backbone and barrier. It holds them up and confines them. By the end of the duet, they are covered in chalk from the pictures and tags they wrote on the board, and we actually see the narrative residue from the stories they struggle to write about themselves on their bodies.

It is hard not to replay every moment of BGLP, because Brown's choreography is so textured and rich. There are no movement or narrative clichés in Brown's work. Brown's work is universal because it manages to detail what it means to be yourself with clarity and specificity. It is clear that Brown wants Black girls (and Black women who may have forgotten their freer selves) to recognize themselves in the piece. But, they won't be able to predict what that self will look like or how you will be ultimately changed after Brown asks them to bear witness to their own complicated story.

The third duet, with the glorious Yusha-Marie Sorzano and Camille A. Brown returning to dance as Yusha-Marie's mother, is something you feel rather than simply watch. Their embodied expression of the intertwined lives of mothers and daughters is almost painful in its beauty. Their movements ache with a vulnerability that is so tender, so strong, and so clear, that you can feel their fingers on your own skin when they touch one another. The visceral impact of this duet is a testament to Sorzano and Brown's fearless honesty in embodying their experience.

I understand that the range of human emotion is full and complex. We feel things we haven't developed the language to explain; the words we do have for the emotions that move through us are often inadequate. But, sitting in the Joyce Theater witnessing Black Girl: Linguistic Play was the first time I sensed that I was feeling something I had never felt before. As I watched, I kept thinking, "So, this is what that feels like. This is what it might feel like to live in a world where you are seen." The tangled and painful history of Black women and representation is well-known, even if simultaneously denied by those with the power to create representations and engineer their enduring impact. To be properly named is validation that you are not, in fact, crazy. Because not seeing yourself can literally make you feel insane.

The brilliant Scott Paterson on piano and Tracy Wormworth on bass guitar provide the original compositions that are more co-text than subtext to the narratives that unfold on stage. Each performance of Black Girl: Linguistic Play is followed by a moderated dialogue with the full company and the audience. This is not superfluous, but an integral part of Camille Brown's process and central to the completion of the final staged performance. The moderated talkbacks are often where it becomes clear that the music, gestures, and interactions that take place on stage resonate with the audience, regardless of age, race, or gender. The talkbacks also reveal the space between entertainment and empathy, artistry and understanding, and performance and reality that are not easy to bridge. Thus, Brown's courageously vulnerable work raises yet another question posed by the poet Kevin Young: "Is it better to be misread or unread?"