For a long time, Ronald K. Brown was inexplicably drawn to choreograph a song by Nina Simone.

		Ronald K. Brown/Evidence Where: Pittsburgh High School for the Creative and Performing Arts (CAPA) Theater, Downtown. When: 8 tonight and Saturday. Tickets: $32 or $12 with student ID; call 412-394-3353 or visit www.proartstickets.org. There will be a "meet the artists" session following the performance. The company will also conduct a master class for advanced dance students at CAPA at 11 a.m. Saturday. Call 412-258-2700.

"I always knew that I had a piece for her or inspired by her music," he says by cell phone from New York as he rushes between appointments. "I was just waiting for it to manifest."

When America became involved in Afghanistan, he began to focus on Simone's "Come Ye," which became a piece co-commissioned by the African American Cultural Center for Brown's company performances this weekend at the Pittsburgh High School for the Creative and Performing Arts Theater. The song "kind of summed up what I was feeling because it was this call for everyone who had to fight for their life while they were dedicated to peace, saying it was a time to learn how to pray," explains Brown. "But I felt paralyzed."

While heading for the airport one day, he saw a line of young soldiers waiting to go to Afghanistan, playing with their Gameboys. He remembered thinking, "Oh man, I just hope that they're ready." That galvanized Brown to complete the project, making him realize that "the prayer warriors are the people behind them, that they really understand the definition of peace. [In that way] we have to be behind all of the actions that our country gets us involved in."

He tried to embody all of his ideas and feelings into the work, which incorporates a short film by director Robert Penn. With Penn pulling images from "revolutionaries" such as Frederick Douglass, people fighting in South Africa and people struggling in South Carolina, Brown could "feel those images behind you and hope and trust that the audience is ... getting excited and empowered by that. You have to understand that the fight for liberation is an ongoing conversation."

Not that Brown is militant. His dance is drawn from the rich textures and historical configurations that make up the term "African American." But it is a dance language that is singularly his, and one that has propelled him to the forefront of a generation of black choreographers.

Born in Brooklyn, Brown turned aside a burgeoning performing career with Mary Anthony and Jennifer Mueller to add business and artistic hats while forming his own company, Evidence, at the age of 19.

Now 38, Brown has virtually grown with his company during nearly 20 years of choreographing and is still enamored with it all. "Doing something you like just for the desire and passion is wonderful, but there are other tools that you need for longevity," Brown says. "I just loved making dances and I never really thought about having a company in terms of running a business, what does it take to keep them employed, especially when you're asking them to invest on this emotional level."

With dancers that ranged from 18 to 31, Brown found that they would need different things from him. In the early years, they were "all peers" and there were points along the way where he would be the youngest. But about five years ago, Brown encountered something that he "didn't know quite how to negotiate." He found himself training "people in terms of what I want -- talented, talented people with less performance experience and less of an idea of what I was asking."

Yes, 38 is that kind of an age, he says, "when you start feeling, 'OK, I'm aging. I don't know how long I'll keep dancing.' " But it's also a time when critics start calling Brown's company "some of the city's best dancers" at New York's recent Fall for Dance Festival. He can also look at a list of awards as diverse as the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and Def Dance Jam Mentor of the Year.

And it seems that everyone is clamoring for his services.

That's odd for someone who once didn't want to be visible. Brown says it was a Catch-22 for him to incorporate board meetings and social affairs that ate into his studio time. Then a friend told him, "So you don't want to be famous. That's too bad and it's too late."

So Brown has learned to balance the reality of business with the reality of art, something that infuses an Evidence performance.

"It's kind of critical for the audience to connect to the work, recognize themselves, recognize real people on the stage," he says. "I don't want them to see only dancers or to be swept away. I guess there's a certain amount of accessibility that I want the work to have, to feel a [dance] gesture in everyday life. And then offstage, to be as honest and as real as possible."

Brown will bring two other representative works as well. "Upside Down" will focus on community mourning, using "the loss of a member as a call to solidarity and a reflection on destiny." "Grace," featuring music by Duke Ellington, Roy Davis,Jr. and Fela Kuti, follows life's journey and is meant to "lift one's spirit and stir one's soul."

"Come Ye" is taking on more resonance in view of the escalation of war in Iraq. Brown feels that the war "inspires" more and more work because "people who are fighting for it and the people we are losing and the people who were born in Iraq, they deserve our attention, our prayers and our compassion."

Even though Brown still simply likes to make dances, it inspires him "to do it every day when I wake up."