Generations Find Place At Jones's Table

Dance Magazine, August, 2001 by Albert Lee

GENERATIONS FIND PLACE AT JONES'S TABLE

BILL T. JONES/ARNIE ZANE DANCE COMPANY AARON DAVIS HALL NEW YORK, NEW YORK MAY 11, 2001

Performing formally for the first time in New York since 1996, the Jones/Zane company capped its four-year community-oriented residency at Harlem's Aaron Davis Hall with its premiere of The Table Project, performed by local residents--non-dancers all. A thoughtful exercise in casting and perception, the piece is delightfully simple: Six middle-aged men, including Jones, amble atop and around a long, blocklike "table" designed by Bjorn Amelan and flanked by steps on either end; then six young girls take their place and perform exactly the same dance again.

Given its lighthearted humor, the piece played like a double feature of Grumpy Old Men and Little Rascals.

Rather than elongated phrases, Jones created choreography comprised of signs, gestural language, and everyday movement. As a trio performed Schubert's Adagio in E-flat for Piano, Violin and Cello, "Notturno," onstage, the men plopped themselves on stools and raised their hands in a "wave"; marched happily across the table; followed a confused leader only to give up and slap the air as if to say, "Aw, phooey!" The men, stocky and mostly bald, were not agile--even Jones stumbled a few times--which lent the piece much of its charm and humor. Yet they also manage to convey a poignant humanity a kind of narrative of prosaic struggle and small triumphs. When they climbed atop the table and braced each other to create a majestic tableau, it felt as heroic as if they had gained the summit of Mount Everest.

The girls, on the other hand, were like kids on a jungle gym--friskier, more limber, and genuinely graceful. Despite a few hesitancies and choreographic mishaps, they bowled confidently into the roles, even adding a back flip here or a sassy arm akimbo there. The piece acquired a more complex internal dynamic, for, unlike the men, the girls differed dramatically in size and stage presence. Though they performed the same choreography, this time one dancer emerged more clearly as the bossy leader, where the littler girls played the followers and sometimes had difficulty keeping up or climbing the steps. It resulted in an interesting subtext of bullying, authority, and "follow-the-leader" games. The audience was tickled; they laughed and cooed like parents at a school play and erupted into frequent applause.

The Jones/Zane company proper performed three works, including Jones's lyrical and notably abstract Some Songs from 1996, set to Jacques Brel singing in French, and Arnie Zane's The Gift/No God Logic, choreographed shortly before the artist succumbed to AIDS. The latter is a sober and vespertine work, set to Verdi arias and performed by three men and one woman with a plaid, bow-shaped pillow attached to her back, suggestive perhaps of wings. Interlocking together in repeating patterns, they achieved an incantatory, almost religious atmosphere.

Finally, Love Re-Defined was Jones's 1996 reworking of a modernist ballet blanc he created for the Lyon Opera Ballet, set to the raspy folk music of Daniel Johnston (including one quirky song that told the tale of poor Godzilla). In Love, Jones has crafted a still life that breathes and regenerates, that rearranges itself. The company, ten dancers in white, groups and regroups in ever-shifting tableaux vivants across the stage. Go here and recline. Go there and fouette. Join us. Gather around. Move away. Occasionally, a few dancers will recline on the floor, propping up a head with a hand, to wait and gaze lazily, before moving on. It feels fleeting and indelible, yet can also be read, like much of Jones's work, as a forest of subplots and emotional motivations.