Gypsy Fires

Russell Patrick Brown, PhD
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Short audio transmissions from an American Gypsy. Insights from the road and the teachings my family has carried for centuries crafted through decades of research. Lacho drom. newsletter.gypsyfires.com

Episodes

  1. 19h ago

    Looking for the Disappeared in the Dance of Fetters

    In the annals of agony, most fall silently. As we finished the last of the white wine after Sinead’s friend up from Kerry went to bed, it happened again. The moon touched houses lightly and lay across recently cut fields while I sunk again to the place of forgetting, and Sinead remembered everything. When understanding man-made misery, it helps to be there. I knew this from years working in US American tech publishing, where the loss of Twitter and the wholesale billionaire buy of the press spelled the invisible death of investigative journalism—and with it, all its promise of public demands for answers. We were not sending people to be there anymore before they tell us what happened. Increasingly, the stories of some are never told. Sinead knew there-ness from being a human rights attorney. At the moment we were passing through Stormont, home of the Government of Northern Ireland in the ‘90s. Bodies are still missing from the Troubles. We had just left the collapsing buildings of Gay and Christopher Streets in New York City—a place where, for seven years, I navigated a hostile system of institutional neglect, housing corruption and the exhausting, everyday erasure that Romani people face when trying to protect their community’s intellectual history. In that silence, you remember what it means to be told that what is happening to you is not happening. Now all over the city people who have fled horrors for refuge disappear off the street. Sinead’s father’s doctor was taken too. Pol Pot and his fear of people with glasses came next. We trade notes on humanity’s collective suffering, tracing time threads for the secret that would stop the weaving of cruelty. As twenty people today are crushed in Gaza as they seek food and the US military supports genocide, I see fantasy. I have continually been an activist, but this approach falters. Was capitalism really welcoming us in, or just giving us a late start in a race already won? Yet, there is survival in rhythm. I was carried across the dance floor in the sway and shuffle of my father’s waltzing steps. My mother taught me to rise and grind across the kitchen floor. This knowledge carried my family through a deeply segregated America, where dark and brown-skinned family members have traveled our roads with hyper-vigilance in order to survive. It pulled us up through the sharp edges of anti-Gypsyism, gave me the courage to outrun homophobic violence and ultimately fueled my escape from a system that never cared about my safety—only what it could extract from me. I can rise, and if I stomp loud enough, I can be heard. This macabre speech continues through the night and follows me through herb-walk chats, across my whiskey rocks in an Irish trad session in Ennistymon and now across computer screen of precious metals most likely harvested with forced labor. We trade notes on dangers never far away. What would happen if we all stopped just to listen? Maria screams with the sea. Artists have long represented exile and transportation; dancers simply hear it. When the empires of the sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries ran the Transatlantic slave trade, the archives show that prisoners cramped in the hold—sometimes for months—were forced onto the deck to dance. The profound cruelty was that this movement was never intended for their well-being, but to keep captives fit enough to maintain their value in slave markets such as the one found at the end of Wall Street on the East River in Manhattan. The empire repeated this choreography on another voyage of bondage. As the British state sought to colonize Australia, it weaponized starvation at home in Ireland and Britain, forcing fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers to steal just to survive. Once arrested for these “petty crimes,” their punishment was transportation halfway around the world to serve as convict labor for aristocrats and merchants. On these transport ships—which carried white, Romani and Traveller captives alike—the baseline technology of the deck remained the same: prisoners were held in fetters, and ship surgeons suggested they dance to preserve their health. There is so much we do not know about what was lost on those waves, but we know the dance was coerced. The long history of colonial enforcement with its perpetual systems of racism, patriarchy and bodily coercion for profit points to a forsaken lineage: the presence of punishment inside the dance. This was the violent taming of the many-headed hydra of commoners, sailors and the enslaved in revolt. This is how the state disappears a soul. Back at the conference with Annette, a senior scholar laughed as he dismissed my work: “What does all this really mean? Can’t we just have fun dancing?” I recall an almost endearing theatrical woodcut of a man dancing a hornpipe in fetters after his arrest, and I see the scholar’s question for what it really is: a refusal to see how the empire turns the suffering of others into a commodity. This experience of oppression, felt so acutely and chronically by the marginalized, remains entirely invisible to those privileged by colonialism. They see a spectacle; they do not see how the chains have changed our shared reality. They would have looked at Master Juba the same way. When Charles Dickens visited New York City and recorded his American Notes, he watched William Henry Lane—the founder of American Tap Dance: Single shuffle, double shuffle, cut and cross-cut; snapping his fingers, rolling his eyes, turning in his knees, presenting the backs of his legs in front, spinning about on his toes and heels like nothing but the man’s fingers on the tambourine; dancing with two left legs, two right legs, two wooden legs, two wire legs, two spring legs—all sorts of legs and no legs—what is this to him? And in what walk of life, or dance of life, does man ever get such stimulating applause as thunders about him, when, having danced his partner off her feet, and himself too, he finishes by leaping gloriously on the bar-counter, and calling for something to drink, with the chuckle of a million of counterfeit Jim Crows, in one inimitable sound! — American Notes for General Circulation. Charles Dickens, 1842. Most scholars and practitioners alike delight in this whimsical, racist representation of a genius who broke through brutal systems designed to suppress him. He went on to bring his performance to Britain and Ireland, where his last presence was recorded in 1851. Since I first read this text in 2014, it has struck me as grotesque: at best the writings of someone trying to cash in on what he did not understand. To Dickens, Lane’s dance was whirling, dazzling nonsense. For those who carry lineages of impact—of violence—we know what we are listening to, and what we are moving beyond. And while Dickens would live on in comfort and dominate the archive, Lane simply disappeared from the public written record. But the dance record, if you listen carefully enough, is different. When I first wrote this piece a year ago, I had known for years in my bones that fetters dancing was important. I did not know why, but I could feel history rhyme in what we call tradition. To dance with impact is an invitation to autonomy of time, space and energy—of what it is to be you, right now, regardless of the bondages imposed upon you. As I tap upon my body, tables and the world as I navigate my own displacement and precarity, these familial rhythms prepared me to re-orient to here. But where did they come from? In my ongoing work to recover the fullness of my culture and understand kumpanija, I began a renewed search into fetters dancing and found the work of contemporary Australian researchers looking into the colonial history of convict dancing. Their work felt like I had found a gigantic piece of the puzzle, but I was not prepared for what came next. As I have gotten to know the work of Frances Roberts Reilly on Substack, she shared with me a piece of her family’s past recently recovered: William Wood the Younger... was described as a fiddler and coachman... standing 5’6” with a kauli mortsi—swarthy complexion, black hair and hazel eyes. In his bloodline, he carried our family’s Gypsy music talents. Australian contemporary Colonial Dance researchers have found that ‘on route to the colony, the surgeons in charge of convicts often encouraged dancing as a healthy activity and this is documented in their medical journals.’ So it’s likely that William took with him our Romany Gypsy hornpipe and jig music... Here’s an account from Rom Moses Heron describing how wrenching it was for sweethearts and families to be separated. Moses took out his knife and cut his diklo—handkerchief from his neck and threw it overboard for them to take the knot back to his sweetheart. He had cut the diklo from under his ear so that the knot was undisturbed but remained just as he had tied it. — Frances Roberts Reilly Here, right before me, was proof that the dance was telling me more about Romani history than what could be found in any academic book. It’s not just the feeling of confirming they were there and what they went through that brings a meaning like no other to do the dance, its the reality that our intuition—our powers to understand the many occupations of the world and how to resist them—is perhaps them looking for us, just as much as our own memory looking for the truth. Our ancestors are trying to find us. Maybe in our batters, shuffles and rallies we keep the sounds going. Maybe the rattles never stopped. Maybe as we lose more loved ones to an abyss created by the greed of the few and the complicity of the many, we can keep their memory going in motion for all to hear. This requires a deep state of listening to the state’s cold annals of agony while performing the living repertoire of the risen. We will undoubtedly keep trying to speak and write for the fallen, just as w

  2. Jul 7

    How to Colonize a Field in 2026: A Case Study in Academic Extraction

    This piece exposes the ongoing exploitation, extraction and erasure of Roma and Sinti people in the Americas. It is a direct response to the publication of The Romani Atlantic by Cambridge University Press—a project that appropriates gadje (non-Roma) narratives and frameworks to re-colonize our culture, our scholarship and our lives. For generations, the gadje world has accused the Roma of kidnapping children, pickpocketing wealth, stealing culture. But as the anti-fascist maxim states: every accusation is a confession. My name is Russell Patrick Brown. I am a Bashaldo Gypsy whose family’s history reaches through the roads of America for generations. My thesis for my master’s degree at NYU focused on dance in 18th-century Atlantic history (2013-2015), and I recently had my PhD at the University of Limerick accepted without corrections. In it, I discovered the hidden, traumatic history of impact-driven dance in the Atlantic world—more commonly known as percussive dance. I have published on early modern maritime dance and the history of harm in wooden shoes. Yet, I am writing to you from exile. I have lost my home of 15 years, I had to flee my life and career as a software engineering manager for America’s largest publisher due to the corruption I am confronting in this case, I do not know when I will see my family again, and I have been pushed out of the very academic territory I helped map. While I was fighting a brutal housing crisis in court to save my West Village apartment—a historic hub of Romani memory once home to Romany Marie’s cafe at 20 Christopher Street—institutional colleagues were finalizing a “field-defining” book. Look closely at the cover of The Romani Atlantic, and then look at the map hanging on the wall of my apartment (since 2014) in this viral Gothamist feature about my pending eviction from my rent-stabilized apartment as the last legal tenant in 14-18 Gay Street in the Greenwich Village of New York City. Whether intentional or symbolic, the extraction is complete. The institution took the map from my wall, the archival labor from my hands, and left the living Romani scholar in exile. They write about the “Atlantic world” as an abstract playground of text, while active colonization displaces the physical, living bodies of the people they study. Ironically, it is my own Atlantic world of allies—and fellow Roma and non-Roma across Europe, Africa and South America—offering literal and intellectual refuge to me in this crisis. I met and got to know these researchers with the belief that we would work together. I believed that I had the knowledge, they had the power, and this would be shared. Now, they have some knowledge, I still have no power and they no longer think they need me. A war came to my door, stole my home and then the wolves came. I had expected that I was collaborating with a project to reclaim Romani and Sinti history and culture for Romani and Sinti people. I had not expected that it would climax into our literal erasure and for the timetakers, as I call them, prestige for the next thirty years. Your support at this critical moment will make the difference between me being able to continue this work and fight colonization in one of its most enduring and hidden forms, or allowing academia to cement new strategies for stealing culture, scholarship and lives for decades to come. Right now, I stand alone. The Real Vampires and Bohemian Groves Dear Traveler, Come sit with me by the fire while we talk of monsters and other perils on the road ahead. It starts with children going missing, then entire peoples are murdered and then memories are altered overnight. What evil could do such a thing? There has been a lot of talk through towns, trains and way stations of vampires—those half-dead, half-alive who feast upon the blood of helpless victims. They may be well-mannered, of fair complexion and smile, but at night they are beasts of incredible force, mind manipulation and seduction that feasts upon the innocent. And innocent here does not just refer to the sexually inexperienced. It’s those whose hearts remain unsullied by greed and hate, braving to bear their souls in a cruel world. They are a vampire’s delight. They are a meal to be sucked dry and discarded before the next victim is sacrificed to a hunger with no end. Irish gothic writer Sheridan Le Fanu gave us the vampire Carmilla in 1872 and Bram Stoker gave us the famous Dracula in 1897, but before that, the Roma had our own lore that helped us at our own fires understand the perils of a world where it is not safe to be human. We know genocides, ethnocides and other horrors await us as well as others who cherish the precious ancient arts of music, dance, craft and story, and are unwilling to be ruled by insatiable greed without honor. In our languages, yes, we have many words for people who harm others for their own gain. We know beasts are at large and many are in charge corrupting the truth, such as Stoker’s version of Dracula and its many re-tellings: our own lore is used against us as we are portrayed not as brown people vulnerable to pale-faced monsters, but as Dracula’s servants. We see a similar manipulation of the truth—that it is us Roma who are stealing children and not the other way around—in Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep (2013). There, Gypsy aesthetics and traditions are used to create “The True Knot,” a nomadic group of psychic vampires whose immortality comes from devouring the torturous pain of children with paranormal abilities. In the wake of the partial release of the Epstein Files by the US FBI and all of its purported horrors including child sacrifice, their accusations look like projection. This perverse dynamic expands far beyond pop culture; it anchors the architecture of elite gadje power itself. Look no further than the infamous Bohemian Grove, where the world’s most powerful politicians, billionaires and imperial architects retreat into the California redwoods. They call themselves “Bohemians,” mimicking a stolen caricature of Romani freedom, camping under a giant stone owl to perform theatrical rituals and broker backroom deals that govern global empires. It is the ultimate manifestation of the colonizer playing dress-up. They drape themselves in the aesthetic of the free-spirited traveler to obscure the greed and destruction they leave in their wake. The colonization of Roma and Sinti culture has always depended upon blaming us for what the empire was doing. In the case of child kidnapping, scholar Noémie Ndiaye calls this a “perverse inversion of the historical realities of early modern human trafficking” (2022). Vampires, egregores, secret networks, colonizers, narcissists, racists….whatever they are….they either lack humanity, or are not human at all. I will leave it up to brilliant psychologists and essayists to make those claims. As a Bashaldo Gypsy working with Roma and Sinti from around the world, I have confirmed that our culture is not about the exotic stereotypes so often imposed upon us by the gadje. It is about preserving who we are, remembering our humanity and protecting ourselves from those who have lost it. 500 Years of Silent Survival For us Roma in the Americas, our history here began with Christopher Columbus’s third voyage in 1498, when Spanish Roma were transported to the colonies as forced laborers. This marked the beginning of a 500-year history in the Americas, which was defined by its own distinct perils and hardships that often mirrored, or even worsened, the systemic persecution left behind in Europe. There is so much that can be said about our history, but I am asking you to notice one thing about this that is the subject, the object and the curse of not only this piece, and of the broader field of Romani studies in the Americas, but of my life: we, American Gypsies, have not been allowed to study it or tell it. We have had gadje scholars and artists make enormous fortunes and careers at our expense. We have had Roma scholars from Europe come and tell our story. We have had first-generation Romani US Americans publish their stories, which is an absolute wonder that even happened. But those of us who have been here, who have survived generations of horrors, we remain silenced. In the American case, the empire has always depended upon appropriating not just our culture, but our ways of creating culture amidst survival as a means of propagating the colonial project. Simply put, colonization loves to play dress-up as us. It drapes itself in the hardship and joys of travel, our ingenuity, our aesthetic, our music and our spiritual knowledge as a means to hide what is really happening: colonization. And few notice when it is pretending to be us. It is a choreography of occupation, and it spreads fast among gadje in its every permutation. Let me be clear: if you claim to represent the Roma and Sinti in the Atlantic world and you are not advocating for our rights in the USA—which controls the hemisphere—you are not our friend. The Harvard FXB Center for Health and Human Rights did an unprecedented study on Roma in the US, and we even saw the passing of a house bill for the preservation of culture, but where did the rest of the institutional momentum and funding go? * Why are we not legally recognized and protected within the USA? * Why are there no departments led by Romani people where other Romani Americans and Roma from around the world can go to study and find sanctuary? * Why are Sinti Americans always erased, including by Romani scholars? * Why are “gypsy laws” on the books all over the country, and why are funded, comfortable scholars who profited and still profit from our suffering not doing anything to strike them down? We survived a system that was not built for us, but built upon us. They have studied our every move, our every lesson since we arrived as slaves. They do not let us tell of our roa

  3. Jun 16

    From Corsets to Six-Pack Abs: The Empire Is Still Shaping Your Body

    Dear Traveler, Tell me of the roads you have taken. Sing for me the songs that you heard over fields along the way. Dance before the fire the journey that on ly you can take. Then we shall dream about where we will go next. When I was born in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, off Lake Erie, my parents took me home to a house they had built almost entirely by hand, with the help of our family of course. The reasoning wasn’t just the American dream of owning land, something essential to survive in this settler state—especially if you are a traveler. My mother did not want to live or raise children in a house full of ghosts. In our family we didn’t necessarily have any problems with spirits hanging around, its just that it’s less work if you don’t have to clean up after them or tell them what to do all the time. Our town of Independence was one of the original five by five mile townships created by the Western Reserve after the Treaty of Fort Industry forced native peoples from the land in 1805. On the 4th of July we celebrated the birth of our nation in the city’s public park, but in the forest that connected to our backyard, I listened to what the land had to say. Through waterfalls, pine groves, forest spirits and rusty abandoned farm tools, my sister and I received another history that told of the violence that really happened. I would come to understand more about how our bodies hold the maps of the land better than any land survey when my mother and father would take us on the road. I would come to know the excitement of the old river towns of the Ohio Valley before we would go on to see the blue grasses of Kentucky, the smoky mountains of Tennessee and the red hills of Georgia. I learned to appreciate the culture of the local people, and to respect and learn from the native people where it was welcome. It was an extraordinary education that taught me that people may have borders, names and identities, but that’s not who they really are. To understand that, you need to watch how they move. When the Romans set about to conquer their known world, they needed a way to understand the land that was less messy and more efficient for their goals than how humans normally understand it. They didn’t want to know much about who lived there, how they felt about the oldest tree in town or why funerals went this way and not that way through the village. They needed a cadastral map: a measured layout of the terrain that assessed all the valuable things within it. It wasn’t just Roman engineering and their military that created occupation within the Celts and other native peoples of Europe, North Africa and Southwest Asia, it was a calculated, unnatural understanding of the world that made it all possible. It was an evolution in our de-evolution as a species. After the fall of the Empire in Rome, this expansive method of conquest would slumber for a thousand years, and re-emerge in new force in 1503 with the founding of the Casa de Contratación in Seville. This was a state-monopoly on New World map-making, and it was essential to the success of their colonization projects. How could they conquer lands if they couldn’t find them? This knowledge was the source of the Spanish Empire’s power, and to leak it was punishable by death. After a century of war and plunder in the Americas, the French Empire expanded this tactic. They knew that while invasion and looting were lucrative, it was not as profitable as keeping power in order to create new extractive economies. To do this, Louis XIV of France and his court needed new tactics. One of them was to control culture and how people moved. In 1661, Louis founded by royal decree the Parisian Académie Royale de Danse. France already had a guild that controlled music, dance and who was allowed to teach it, but in the Académie the ideal French courtly dancing, musical body could be under his control. This power was disseminated through traveling dancing masters—and not the “rogue” ones like those of my people—and their state-approved dance manuals. These were literal maps of how bodies should and shouldn’t move. They would evangelize to the world his new elite, “absolutist” aesthetic that often dressed itself in the feathers, dyes and fabrics looted from the empire. His dancing masters would invent nonsensical patterns of movement that imitated and were designed to supplant more ancient systems of dance the empire was in regular contact with. They created something truly unnatural: a literal cadastral map of how bodies should move. Today, we simply refer to this system as ballet. Its power wasn’t just in an aesthetic designed for absolute control, it was that it was made irresistible by its proximity to wealth and power. We find evidence of this influence all the way from Nova Scotia to Congo Square in New Orleans, from the crossroads of County Clare to the ports of Australia. And once something stays popular, when the promise of a life of beauty and pleasures is enticing long enough, it becomes its own gilded cage. We forget how we used to move, and then the only dream anyone has is the one a king in France had in a gigantic palace hundreds of years ago. In time corsets have become six-pack abs. Ostentatious dresses that were the spectacle of the court (often costing women their lives when their numerous skirts brushed up against the candles on the floor and they burned alive) have become extreme, luxurious influencer diets that are just as perilous. Men have traded high heels and fashions of the court for “manosphere” luxury items they can show off online. The tastes may change, but the pattern of movement reveals the same person with the same desires. If you enjoyed this piece, please consider subscribing so you have access not just to these Gypsy Fires, but to the Timedancing Lab. There I teach how to break free from occupation in your body and establish your own movement sovereignty in community. As I move between the forest, the road and the courts of power today like so many Roma before me, I do my best not to be too bothered about the tastes of the gadje (non-Roma). For me and people like me who remember movement that’s older than any empire, the problem for us emerges when all movement is controlled. Now here you might expect me to talk about how war, slavery and systems of power create new methods to control how people move. And I do write about that often. Tonight, as we sit by the fire, that’s not my main concern. The greatest danger for me, and for any moving person, isn’t that we all move the same. It’s when people forget to move at all. There’s a basic principle here: to control land, build a cage like the Roman and Spanish empires did. To control people and get their consent to do it, create an irresistible aesthetic culture intimately intertwined with brutality and absolutism. To control thoughts and ideas, create a world where people no longer want to change their minds. For the empires of today, weapons, cages and consumer cultures aren’t the only weapons of war. It’s making people forget there was ever anything other than the prison they have been raised within. Make sure they cannot venture forth from their towns to meet people different from them, and make them afraid of the neighbor next door. Make sure they cannot move their bodies in ways that might disturb other people from their paralysis. Make sure their hearts can no longer feel the threads of time pulsing through the land. Take the burden of creativity, thought and emotions away entirely. Indigenous countermapping refers to the practice of mapping real human relations to the land, to the natural world, to landmarks and to each other. These can be in the form of actual maps, but this can also take the shape of storytelling, music and, yes, even dance. When we learn to read the hidden history of the land and what happened there in our own bodies, we find a real map that can help us find our way home. We can discover as I did in the Fashion Institute of Technology Library in NYC that wooden shoes, slavery and forced labor were all connected and would change the way we walked and related to the land. We can discover as my friend Maria showed me that we don’t always have to learn tradition from a teacher—sometimes the teacher is in our DNA waiting for us to listen to it. It is the bear-hug from my grandmother that she learned because someone in our family before her learned that holding someone tight was survival. At this Gypsy Fire, we read hidden histories in the body so that we might shape the world we want to live in by consciously being the people we want to be within it. This Gypsy’s dream is a simple one. I wish to help you shatter through the cages of nothingness that are enclosing us as we speak, trapping us in empty-headed greed. I want to hear you sing to your newborns again through kitchen windows as I pass on by, welcoming them into a world of human play, sound and love. As I drive through fields I want to hear your people sing to the corn again, and when I return I’ll help fix a few things around town while we enjoy the harvest. May your dreams tonight roam far beyond any map, and when you wake trust that your body will know how to take the next step to get there. I’m here to help you listen. Lacho drom, Russell If you’d like to learn how to read the hidden histories the body carries and find your choreo-destiny, join us in the Timedancing Lab. The first course, Choreonavigating Crisis, begins June 21. Six lessons in movement for creativity in times of collapse, drawn from my family’s Bashaldo tradition and my doctoral research. Paid subscribers receive every lesson; founding members join the live sessions. Come move with us. If you’d just like to sign up for the class (3 months of Substack included), here is the link: https://luma.com/choreonavigating. If you have enjoyed sitting by the fire with me, please consider inv

  4. Jun 9

    There Is Only One Field Ready for an AI Age

    Welcome back to Gypsy Fires. This letter is about dance and why it knows more about AI than Stanford or MIT. Dear Traveler, Meet me tonight under the Blue Whale. There we will turn in to rest after we danced around the world—spinning through the seas, swaying over ice with the Arctic muskox, flying through the African Savannah and exploding through the cosmos. We will build machines to keep our ideas moving, and maybe you’ll join my kumpania as we train our own robots to predict the storms of Jupiter. We will sleep under a sea monster and dream together of a future where technology does not help extract from nature, but helps us understand it and live as part of it. The year is 2019, and we are joining data scientists, software engineers, product designers and NASA scientists organized into teams for a weekend in the American Natural History Museum in New York City. Outside we can all feel the fabric of the world as we know it being steadily pulled apart, but together we are stitching creative ambition together so that we can better understand our solar system—our tribe of planets hovering around a star. On my team, we’re using the patient power of statistics to train a machine on how to read NASA’s pictures of the storms of Jupiter so that we might be able to ask how they form and why. By the morning and after many bags of potato chips, cups of coffee and cavorting through the empty halls of the museum alone, our baby “AI” is able to make small predictions on what a Jovian tempest will do next. Through open source technology—the unpaid backbone of computer technology and internet crafted and cared for by gentle, brilliant souls—and collaborations with space scientists and the patented algorithms of other highly intelligent hardworking people, we worked together alongside other teams to show how computers can do more than make people money. They can solve a few of the most ancient questions we’ve been able to find as a species. Now it is 2026, and this egalitarian vision of Machine Learning, what people are now calling Artificial Intelligence, has gone missing. Someone took it away in the middle of night while we were sleeping around our fires, and we are now awaking to a forest that has disappeared. An ocean turned to acid. Our young mothers and fathers told to go home because there is no work today, and they are told there never will be work or payment for it again. Some do not even make it home, and in an increasing number of cases we don’t know what happened to them. In the distance we see a massive building spewing smoke into the air and hear the steady roar of machines set to work on tasks that no one seems able to make any sense of. The world watches afraid. I watch, afraid. What is happening on the roads that hold the world together? On the roads of my birth home, Turtle Island? Are people fleeing? Enjoying a luxury vacation? Will we meet animals on the road, or are they gone too? The world is awake to what Artificial Intelligence might be and awash in interpretations of what it means for us. As I pass by conversations on my route, I notice most people can’t even agree on what intelligence even is and whether it can ever be artificial. If human intelligence can in fact be manufactured, do we want that? If it is only somewhat able to be reproduced robotically, is that useful? At what cost? A constellation of problems erupts that is not failure of the computer, but the failure of our global (especially US American) leadership to understand how the machine of the world runs at all. If we turn to the university, where I decided to try my chances in hopes of finding like-minded people beyond my verda, there is only one department that’s always already been prepared to face the existential questions of a potential age of AI. It’s probably near to if not the least funded. It’s not easy to find, it’s rarely required and is certainly the least respected. It’s dance. Gypsy Fires is a completely reader-supported publication. Your support keeps the fire going. Thank you. Yes I am saying that there is a department in the university that has vastly more experience than Stanford or MIT’s AI labs in asking existential questions about us, and that’s because it’s the only discipline where you can’t pretend to take people out of it. While we keep pumping billions into elaborately asking what a universe would be like without us, dance has always kept us in research, in practice, in theory, in the archives, in the classroom, in the world and in life. We have Diana Taylor who has been telling us for over two decades that what we record doesn’t always align well with what we remembered to keep doing. We have Thomas DeFrantz telling us that we can refuse the call to do work we shouldn’t be asked to do in the first place, but we don’t have to be lost either. We can dance right now, together. We have Jacqueline Shea Murphy telling us that we need to listen to indigenous people, not just because it’s the right thing to do but because there is so much wisdom there asking us to stop fighting it. We have Lynn Brooks, Julie Malnig and Linda Tomko who have shown us that dance has always been a science of aspiring to our best selves, and continuing to play anyway when it doesn’t work out. We have Judith Butler’s gender as a performance, which if we return to Vogue/Ballroom House we learn that we were meant to have fun with gender too. We have Sarah Whatley asking what are the choreographies of laws, and how do those of us who don’t fit within those laws move at all? We have André Lepecki asking how we can understand the political and police as choreographers of liberation and control, and how they propagate in themselves a dance. We have Nadine George-Graves asking why we have a history of consuming Black bodies, and how do people of color move through such a landscape with such terrors hidden within it? Báyò Akómoláfé asks us to embody what it means to build a society today from our traditions. We have Breandán de Gallaí asking what does it mean to move with your native language, especially when so few around you speak it. And there is my friend and colleague in Romani Dance Studies, Rosamaria Kostic Cisneros, asking so courageously within communities: what is it to be hero for your own people? There are thousands of people who devoted their lives to helping you not just ask who you are, but excited for you to move through the question and discover the answer in motion. You now also have me, your neighborhood internet Gypsy, inviting you to query what is intelligence itself? If we listen to the physicists, those dance scholars of the forces of the earth, sea and sky, we can consider that we’re all made up of space, time and energy—and that these three things are inseparable. They are understood together. And notice, they didn’t say space, time and shareholder value. They didn’t say space, energy and laws or religions. Just these three simple things. With this information let’s rewind our clock further back—and then much further back again—and try asking again what is intelligence. The building blocks of awareness—the consciousness that gives rise to intelligence—is motion itself. We don’t understand anything until we have changed position. Or we discovered after venturing forth or within. Collapsed and then got up again. What foundation of intelligence is crafted from the orbit of a star—a faithful returning? Did the first lifeforms come to be because they just are, or was it because they went looking for something? We can understand an American Bison because we can see it in a museum or dissected in a lab. But, as has been confirmed this year, Bison have meaning because of their knowledge: their massive herd migrations nourish their families and the landscape. We only need to let them roam again. I stay on my road not just because I am stubborn. I stay not just because I know at the end of many gadje roads for some reason they keep putting meat grinders, as gilded and as comfortable as they may be. I stay on the road because it leads to more paths. The more I keep moving the more I understand why others moved before, and I can fortune-tell where people might go in the future. I know intimately that the magic in machines isn’t in how we make them look and feel like us, but in how they move and “think” in their own right. And that’s what allowed me to climb up into tech management in rare speed. I knew how to get there. That night I slept under the whale, I made a decision to stay on the road of collaborative scientists, computer technologists and creatives working to solve the world’s problems. In the years that followed, COVID, aggressive tech monopolies and personal brands pulled people away from this modest, kind, exciting road and onto superhighways and private jets. Many were simply pushed off the road and into ditches. At seven years out, I know as a Gypsy and a dance scholar that now is about the time where people start forgetting that the other more open source, egalitarian possibilities for our technological future were ever there at all. Tonight, camp under the whale with me. We have hopes to engineer together. Lacho drom, Russell Thanks for reading Gypsy Fires! This letter is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit newsletter.gypsyfires.com/subscribe

  5. Jun 2

    Welcome to Gypsy Fires

    Dear Traveler, Come rest. The fire has been waiting for you. I’m Russell Patrick Brown, an American Bashaldo Gypsy—we have many names, don’t worry about it. I grew up on the same roads my family has traveled for generations between the Great Lakes into the Appalachian Mountains and down into Georgia. We’ve carried those who have come before through music, dance, ingenuity, survival and “knowing” the threads of human life through time. For the last twenty years I’ve carried my tradition to Los Angeles on film, on the New York stage and on to Ireland for my PhD and now Spain, where I am getting to know the Gitanos, or Spanish Gypsies, better. I am in exile from my home at 18 Gay Street at the corner of Christopher Street in New York City—where I had the same landlord whose parents had rented a small cafe over a century ago at 20 Christopher to Romany Marie, who would become The Queen of the Greenwich Village Bohemians, and a tiny basement apartment at 14 Gay to Ruth McKenney, whose 1930s New Yorker sketches about her sister Eileen would eventually become Leonard Bernstein’s 1953 musical, Wonderful Town. Gypsy Fires arrived after all my roads converged on one impossible conclusion: I am a Gypsy. I have resisted this label my entire life in every way I could manage: escape, shame, self-erasure, refusal, assimilation, fantasy, appropriation, lust, denial and abstraction (the Substack I opened last year). In mid-life, I am grateful to join the throngs of the mature, who are in fact tired of fighting what is true. I surrender. The most well-known book on American Gypsies, Gypsy Fires in America: A narrative of life among the Romanies of the United States and Canada, was written about families like mine passing through Southern Ohio. It is a complicated book full of real people portrayed as having the minds of children. Men were portrayed as con artists and women as lusty muses. It was published three years after the photograph of my family’s Prohibition-era verda was taken in 1921—and one year after the Greenwich Village Bohemian movement collapsed as fascism rose in Europe. It is strange to think Irving Brown, the author of the book, might have met my great grandmother, who taught my mother, danced with my father and yelled at me until I was ten years old for putting my feet on the davenport. She left her playing cards out on the kitchen table for when someone would come through the back door for a reading. I am opening this fire to you, stranger who I hope may become my friend, because you are the one who heard the call to sit by my side. I am the last of my family to carry this practice fully, and last year I had to go into exile from my home country (the USA) as well as my adopted country for almost twenty years, Ireland. In the arts and academia, our suppression and erasure grows fiercer by the day, despite the modest gains from fellow Roma. Global public health reports for the Roma and Sinti worsen by the year. There is talk of death camps returning. From the gadje (non-Roma) perspective, things look bad. From my perspective as a Gypsy, I do not wait or depend upon anyone saving me, even when help comes. I know that life is not led by self-actualization, liberation, trauma or manifesting what we want, but by impact. It is in our myriad collisions that we face disruption and—if we can—find discovery. It is the countless great and small impacts of our lives that we come to know ourselves, each other and the world around us better—in this time and all times. My road may have ended somewhere I did not expect, but I know that I have only just begun a deeper dance with time itself. Here you’ll find guidance to help you re-approach what you know, what you didn’t know and what you didn’t know you already knew about Gypsy life, which has inspired the world for centuries. As the very old war on life slithers, mutates, bombs and engulfs more and more of what we love and what we need to survive, I hope that you find rest, repair and inspiration for the road ahead. I also hope that your own memory is awakened; we must remember every road through human history that we can. Your truth is needed. I’ve structured this newsletter into three parts. Road Reports are short, free dispatches on what the week has brought down the road and into the verda of the soul. All are open to everyone. I only ask that you comment and share what has happened on your travels, and what you have seen as you passed by. Teachings are lessons drawn from Gypsy life defined not as stereotype, ethnographic study, or human rights crisis, but as a way of life that has inspired the world for centuries. Some Teachings are free; most are for paid readers because the deeper rooms of a culture have always been kept for those who choose to stay. Gifts from the Fire are monthly practices held for paid subscribers: guided harp meditations, Timedancing exercise guides, embodied transformation eGuides, audio mini-workshops, heritage reclamations, and written fortunes. They are yours to keep, return to, and use in your own work. Some of what I’ve written before will return here in revised form, alongside new work. Some will live in books I’m preparing and am excited to tell you more about soon. There is also a private space, the Verda, held free for Romani and Sinti readers, by introduction. The fire is a meeting place and meeting places must be open; the verda is the home, and homes are kept private. If you are Romani or Sinti and would like to be welcomed in, please write to me. I’ll finish today with our message as a people, as recorded by Nico Rost in Paris, May 1963, when he interviewed the President of the World Roma Organization, Ionel Rotaru, His Highness Vaida Voevod III. My new friend Vicente Lehnsherr translated and shared it me: “We are the symbols of a world without borders, a free world, where weapons will be banned, where everyone can move freely from the steppes of Central Asia to the Atlantic coast, from the plateaus of southern Africa to the forests of Finland.” Stay. Please introduce yourself. Share a song. Remember what it is to be human. Through snaps, claps, taps, slaps and stomps, we’ll continue. Lacho drom, Russell This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit newsletter.gypsyfires.com/subscribe

  • 5 Episodes

About

Short audio transmissions from an American Gypsy. Insights from the road and the teachings my family has carried for centuries crafted through decades of research. Lacho drom. newsletter.gypsyfires.com

Information

  • Creator
    Russell Patrick Brown, PhD
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    5
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Russell Patrick Brown
  • Show Website
    Gypsy Fires