Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company - Joyce Theater, New York, New York, October 19-31, 1993

Dance Magazine, Feb, 1994 by Camille Hardy

Bill T. Jones certainly has a sufficient personal following to sustain a two week season in New York City, but the announced presentation of five premieres promised more excitement than was actually delivered by the new repertoire. Jones's dazzling band of dancers was the real highlight of the appearances at the Joyce, with Heidi Latsky and Arthur Aviles deserving the lion's share of attention, along with Andrea E. Woods and Rosalynde LeBlanc, an apprentice and newcomer to the ensemble.

Throughout his career Jones has been rightly admired for his willingness to deal with social issues in his choreography. Yet much of the new work seen in October seemed strident, rather than probing, and more than a little self-indulgent. While communities across the country continue trying to find the means - emotionally, scientifically, and financially - to cope with death and AIDS, Jones's musings on these topics seem calculated more to focus attention on himself than on the actual health crisis. So many bald heads and bare male butts on Jones's stage also tend to trivialize these issues, placing them on a par with selling jeans or perfume.

The solo for Aviles, Achilles Loved Patroclus, is just saved from smartness by the dancer's extraordinary concentration and his stunning abilities as a performer. Broken columns and a tunic that leaves most of Aviles's body exposed set the classical context for this vision of the death of Achilles's adored Patroclus, initially recorded in Homer's Iliad. Recitations from the epic, along with snatches from Michael Jackson, are woven into John Oswald's audio collage. Spectators hear details of the particularly gory demise of Patroclus at the hands of Hector, and one recalls the vicious personal revenge Achilles wrought against the Trojan hero for killing his "intimate friend," in Homer's words.

Aviles spends most of his solo on the floor, writhing his powerful body into compelling shapes. He enters by propelling himself in a prostrate position, sliding along his back, and later reverses this to a prone posture, inching along with his face to the floor. The image of two deaths is hinted at obliquely, and the throes of agony are mutely summoned by Aviles.

An obtuse quality - as if the piece were unfinished - imbued the premiere of War Between the States as well. The dancers, again, were gorgeous, and looked wonderful in particularly natty red-white-and-blue costumes by Isaac Mizrahi. Sections of two string quartets by Charles Ives, performed by the Diaspora Players, provide the score. The first was written in the brightness of the composer's youth, and the second was created at a much more somber time of maturity and disillusion. The choreography attempts to question the disparate attitudes toward AIDS in the United States. A duet for Jones and Maya Saffrin was the most memorable section.

There were so many, based on a poem by Jones, was danced to John Cage's Six Melodies for Violin and Keyboard. Printed in the program, the text refers to the many blossoms shaken from a "half concealed" peach tree and asks: "Will we ever see the others again? Will they return to us across these fallen flowers?" Flowing white fatigues by Linda Pratt and Jean Claude Mastroianni add to the dance's elegiac quality. Formal, almost ritual, patterns fill the stage and succeed in suggesting a cast of hundreds that diminishes, at the end, to a man and a woman. The pair recline and reach toward the sky in a gesture toward departed friends.

And the Maiden, a premiere, is a solo for the spectacular Woods that incorporates "O Death," by Bessie Jones, and music selected from the Georgia Sea Island Songs. The company premiere of the bouncy male duet Just You, commissioned originally by Creach/Koester, was danced by Aviles and Eric Geiger or Torrin Cummings and Daniel Russell.

Revivals of the ever-trivial How to Walk an Elephant (a parody of George Balanchine's Serenade) and Molissa Fenley's dreary Esperanto (with Fenley in the central role at one performance) were also presented. While the dancers in the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company never looked better, the overall season summoned up a classical image (one not related to the Trojan War): Narcissus gazing at himself in a reflecting pool.