Creative, Cathartic, and Critical Bill T. Jones Dances
What does Bill J. Jones want and what does the audience get? A dance artist whose concerns transcend the confines of dance, Jones's dance language speaks to universal themes of purpose in life, death, fear, prejudice, anger, love, desire, pleasure, personal and cultural identity and how nothing can ever be the same when cultures collide. Jones reflects on being black in America, being vulnerable, racism, homophobia, the ravages of AIDS and terminal disease. He explores his own journey of societal abuse, love, loss and renewal.
Since 1982, Jones has been provocatively expressing his beliefs and values in uninhibited, outspoken, angry, cynical and hopeful dances. He carries forward in the American tradition of protest, challenging both the rules of dance and the norms of society. Jones exploded the notion of what dancers should look like by creating a multicultural company of various sizes and shapes. A former member was close to 300 pounds. Jones challenged gender roles with unisex costumes and movements. In some dances, he lifted a woman as is traditionally done. And then she lifted him, reflecting gender equality. In "Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin," Jones had nearly 50 members of his company and the local community onstage in-the-buff to show the common humanity of all people.
Jones has an instantly recognizable style: One sees charismatic power as he uses his muscularly defined physique and long graceful arms and fingers in physical virtuosity or simple everyday movement, balanced or off-balance, flowing curvilinear lines or raw physicality, provocative partnering and surprise movements. He recites commentary and texts and employs silence as well as old and new music. Jones's mesmerizing movement is at times feline and crisp, still and quirky. He draws heavily upon isolated movements, such as finger fluttering, shoulder rotating, torso undulating, pelvis moving and head rolling or jutting forward and back to center.
Although he has created abstract and beautiful dances and dances parodying other choreographers' formal dances, Jones's signature style has articulate compelling perspectives, metaphorical allusions and varied emotional expression on the major issues of our times. Less postmodern dance than performance art, his raging work arouses audience members to question his dances and relevance to their own lives. He himself is always asking questions.
Jones, now 53, improvises fluidly seductive, athletically vigorous and dramatic movement that he transforms interacting with his dancers (half his age). Let's look at the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company's recent visit to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC. Zane, who died of AIDs, was Jones's partner in art and life.
On November 17, 2005, Jones's powerful solo dancing was spotlighted in a four-part suite, "As I Was Saying...An Evening of Dance, Text and Music with Bill T. Jones and Friends," a combination of mainly solos but also duets and trios. "With the Good Lord," a tribute to Jones's mother performed to the legendary 1950s performance and jazz artist Lord Buckley, began and ended with Jones alone and in darkness. Leah Cox and Donald C. Shorter, Jr. performed a convivial interlude.
In "Do You Be" Jones appeared on video and in person, accompanied by the distinctive voice of singer-performer Meredith Monk. Jones's multiple persona were seen in a snappy fedora and pleated trousers overlaid with his ghostly half-images and then naked, doffing his hat and breaking into joyful laughter.
"22" comprises a series of poses Jones reached through repeated movement sequences while he wove an extended monologue about different stories, including his grandmother and her garden, a gruesome fable set in the impoverished South that involves unspeakable acts done to a child, and a photojournalist in genocidal Rwanda who discovers a live little boy in a pit of slaughtered humanity. During his silences, fantastic lighting displays made Jones look suspended in fog.
Cox and Shorter performed a warm "Duet" to music from Madagascar and the Ivory Coast. In "Chaconne," Jones pursued Nurit Pacht around the stage while she played a Bach partita for violin.
Life does have its joys. Jones enforced this message with an utterly delightful encore solo improvised with inviting hip swivels, shimmies, ripples and grand smiles to Blossom Dearie's rendition of "Surrey With a Fringe on Top" from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical "Oklahoma!"
"Blind Date," Jones's full-company, evening-length, multimedia work accompanied by original music and text was performed on November 18 and 19. "Blackboard" and pulpit, the stage spotlighted issues of patriotism, fundamentalist religions, church-state relations, the personal stories of some of Jones's foreign-born dancers, the continuity of evil and such provocations as "fourth generation warfare," "nothing ever changes" and "starting over."
Bjorn G. Amelan's set at times cleverly framed the universal and specific as Jones zeroed in on his own country (he began working on "Blind Date" after the 2004 elections). Different languages and facial images of people of all races and ages, along with texts in a variety of languages, appear electronically on rectangles, projections and panels that slide up and down. A doorway jamb -- entry or exit for human behavior -- sits on one side of the stage.
Before the lights go down, several video screens about the stage project liberal bits of textual assertions such as "A fair, just and productive society depends on religious tolerance," "The greatest human crimes have been committed in the name of religion and the name of God" and "Religions should be reasonable and result in the highest moral behavior."
We're soon thrust into a confusing world of surrealism and metaphor with overlapping and simultaneous events. Endorsing the values of the Enlightenment, Jones attacked what he calls a national atmosphere of "toxic certainty" exercised by the kind of discourse we're having in this country. He questioned the expediency of war, certainty in a climate where personal expression of all kinds is increasingly scrutinized. And he reflected on limited opportunities for the urban poor and remarked on the centrality of sexual moralism to the Republican agenda.
In one scene, a voice recited Biblical and Moslem proscriptions and penalties against some sexual acts. Jones prompted his audiences to question why they abide by some norms and consider others have no validity.
Personal foibles, too, like smoking, came under scrutiny. Jones smokes periodically onstage. He asks for a cigarette, and turning to the audience says he's going to quit.
Against a video of a fast-food enterprise called Quack-a-Dack, a boy, a sitting duck, was transformed from luring customers to being lured into the army, both activities giving a sense of dis-cipline and purpose, both of questionable import. The company's dancers simulated military drills. The sequence ended in a pop-influenced duet between Jones and another dancer; the war charges on, as does the party.
The "Security" segment evokes the balance of fear, panic and faith maintained as the natural order of things in the post-9/11 world. The trauma of Oklahoma bombings, earthquakes, floods, human rights violations and genocide came to the fore. As in trust-building exercises used in contact improvisation in dance and in alternative therapies, dancers ran around the stage and one at a time fell screaming, "Me!," while others coalesced to catch the falling dancer.
Jones has been quoted as saying, "Are we all happy here with the way things are? Do we want to change what we can change? What are we afraid of? Does beauty exist? What does it look like? When people come [to the performances], they want to experience something transformative. I want it as well."
He seeks community in a fractious world. "A lot of the engine that has driven me exists between two polarities: my incredible anger and impatience with the world, and an intense desire to be loved, to not be alienated, to be connected and worthy of this world," Jones says. "Anger and desire for inclusion -- I feel those two forces ricocheting in me always when I am in front of the public....I'm trying to find ways to make rituals that acknowledge that we are part of each other and part of something bigger than our own egos."
Do you make and perform dances about what matters to you? Or do you decide not to dance to make a statement about what you think is important? A daring innovator fearless about dealing with controversy, Jones appears to do both. To dance or not to dance? Jones's dancing is a dramatic statement, but so, too, is not dancing. He was the first major artist to propose boycotting the Spoleto Festival that was held in Charleston, South Carolina, if the State continued to fly the Confederate battle flag, a symbol of racism and slavery for many people, over its capitol.
I asked Jones what he thinks is the role of dance in society and what dancers should be doing. "I'm a dancer and an artist. Artists are people. Almost everything one does is a political act though not always a calculated one. An artist should do what that person feels compelled to do -- to bring into the world some vision. Most people's lives are mediocrity and repression. When someone has a passionate vision, he or she finds a language. The passion and the vision have a chemical action that propel the material."
Jones thinks young people "should be exposed to the ideas that are out there. They should see dance and respond to it. And dancers should ask, 'What is their work in the service of? What is the most effective way of doing it?' Each path has its price."
So what will you do in and through dance?