THE GIRL CLUB

BY KAY KUDUKIS

Meet Aneka Brown, a badass dancer, fashion designer and event producer

Although life began in San Luis Obispo, Aneka Brown has called Palm Springs home since she was 6 years old.

As a couple, Mom and Dad didn’t make it, and Mom remarried a white man. I ask Brown who she takes after, Mom or Dad, and she says she got a good mix of qualities from all three. Nature and nurture at its finest.

Little girls dream of being ballerinas, and so it was with Brown. Sometimes, little-girl ballerina dreams fade with knowledge and time (yay STEM program), while other girls realize they don’t have the talent or drive. Brown’s experience was a one/two punch to the gut. Here’s No. 1: “I was told that I would never be able to even know that I was technically good. I just didn’t have the body type, because I was too muscular to be a ballerina.”

Here’s No. 2, a 2022 survey of balletcompany dancers by ethnicity:

• Hispanics 26%

• Asians 9.1%

• African Americans 3.8%

• Other/declined to say: 10.6%

• Caucasian: 50.5%

The disparity in the late 1980s was even greater than it is today, and the blatant racism was not lost on Brown. There were no well-known Black dancers “besides Katherine Dunham and Debbie Allen—and they were choreographers,” Brown said. “You did not see any African-American prima ballerinas. There was no Misty Copeland for me at the time.” squads were much more diverse, and, Brown tells me, it became more about talent.

Palm Springs High School had an elite pep/ cheer squad that did dance routines. Brown (whose maiden name is Knight) tried out for “song leader” with five other AfricanAmerican girls—and none of them made the squad. Brown studied dance for 10 years, the final four with Alvin Ailey dancer Michael Green, and she played sports; lest you think she was not full of cheer, Brown is all cheer.

So, what do you follow that up with?

“I thought I was going to join the Peace Corps, because I wanted to go to Africa. That didn’t happen,” she said. “I ended up going to Fresno, (to be) around my dad’s family and get to know them more.”

Fresno had more people with faces like hers, so she settled in and went to college for a spell; she then moved back to Palm Springs and took a job as head cheerleader and choreographer for a local semi-pro sports team. She also taught dance at the Boys and Girls Club. Choreography skills took her to Los Angeles, where she had a variety of gigs in the music industry.