At the Joyce Theater on opening night, One Shot began with a projection of Harris as a young man and with dancer Keon Thoulouis on stage, looking very much like the serious and straight-staring photographer (who died ten years ago). As Thoulouis flew and dipped into Brown’s luscious, loose-limbed phrases that syncopated time with Anonimo Consejo’s Cuban rap and Billy Strayhorn’s classical jazz, Clifton Taylor’s “photo integration design” zoomed in on Harris’s gleaming pupil. Inviting us to ask who was this man, choreographer Brown responded, presenting approximately a dozen of Harris’s photographs, which chronologically spanned his career and which traversed up and down each image like a roving eyeball. Brown’s eight scenes brought these decades-old shots into motion through his dancers whose youth and intensity reflected Harris's subjects.

What Harris photographed—kids with world-weary stares, glamorous Lena Horne reflected in a mirror, a picketing worker protesting U.S. Steele’s discriminatory hiring practices in 1968, couples in courtship, funerals and legendary jazz musicians—might have in the hands of a less disciplined choreographer become a floating parade of images divorced from the dancing. Worse yet Brown could have used the arresting black and white photographs as a crutch to give his choreography emotional resonance. But Brown, who began his career with former Limon dancer Jennifer Muller, and who expanded his vocabulary with dance from West Africa, the Caribbean and the Disco era, has a voice that perfectly matches Harris's: He too treats his medium like a prayer for the betterment of his community—African Americans whose time on U.S. soil numbers more years as slaves than as free people.

In the section titled Bellows, a term for an accordion-like device mounted on cameras to magnify a subject’s size, Brown walked the square of the stage, becoming a human viewfinder. To music by jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal (who was born like Harris in Pittsburgh), the 41-year-old dancer demonstrated in a solo that his mellifluous physicality hasn't diminished with age. Intermittently, Brown held one arm straight up and the other straight out. The gesture reminded me of a man half crucified and half sun saluting. When Brown’s company joined him, this gesture resolved itself: Each dancer’s side-stretched arm floated over their head, forming with the other arm a halo. This moment of peace, however, didn’t last long. Harris’s photograph of dozens of caskets, the company in khaki Army fatigues, Mamadouba Mohammed Camara (a Djembe master drummer and composer from Guinea) laying down a torpedo of beats, and Juel D. Lane machete-slicing arms and soaring, suspending turns spoke of dark days.

I have only complaint about One Shot. Not enough of the New York audience saw it. On opening night a snowstorm covered the city and the theater was half empty. Worse yet the company has no plans to tour abroad. This is a shame. Like a beloved black and white photo, One Shot lingers in my mind's eye. Here is a dance with staying power.

Thoulouis, Brown, Lane