Bill T. Jones: Still Dancing Outside the Lines

Crisis, The, May/Jun 2004 by Ards, Angela

dance

After the lights go down at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a lone, nude male dancer enters stage right with a determined amble, gesturing with his arms and hands. One by one, dancers emerge from backstage, joining him until there are dozens of gesticulating bodies - tall, short, Black, White, male, female, sinewy, fat, young, old - all nude, circling the stage.

"Continuous Replay," a riveting, playful performance by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, has spilled onto the stage. The group is celebrating is 20th anniversary and it's the final night of its five-day run in February.

As the multicultural procession wends its way around the performance space, dancers leave the stage in waves and all gradually return wearing black bottoms or tops. A tall, bald man in black pants strolls with attitude, refusing to break his stride while the procession maneuvers around him. The dancers again depart in cycles, only to return moments later each clad in white. A curly-haired man in loose white linen excitedly bounds across the stage like a child at recess. A woman dances an energetic solo as if touched by the spirit of a Saturday night jam or Sunday morning praise. The diverse mass of idiosyncratic humanity, flowing across the stage like blood through veins, is a metaphor for life's changes, its sorrows and joys.

It is fitting that "Continuous Replay," one of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company's oldest repertory pieces, should conclude its appearance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in New York, where the dance company debuted more than 20 years ago. The piece recalls when Jones and Zane, partners in dance and life, burst onto New York's avant-garde dance scene, determined to mold human bodies into what Jones describes today as "moving sculpture." Originally choreographed as a solo, the production was staged as an ensemble piece as a testament to the dance company's longevity through loss and change over the last two decades. Zane died of AIDS complications in 1988, leaving Jones to, as he puts it, "prove that the two of us had in fact created something that could withstand the test of time."

Today, the company has performed its repertoire of more than 75 works, including award-winning performances like "DMan in the Waters," "Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land" and "The Table Project" for audiences all over the world. The landmark 2003-04 season includes a mix of new and old works entitled "The Phantom Project."

Over the years Jones has been recognized for his artistic vision. He received a MacArthur "genius" award in 1994 and the Dance Heritage Coalition named him "An Irreplaceable Dance Treasure" in 2000. At the same time, a critic once dubbed Jones the "Muhammad Ali of the dance world" for his provocative stances on and off the stage.

In 2000, he refused to perform at the annual Spoleto Festival in Charleston, S.C., an act of solidarity with lhe NAACP boycott of the state for flying the Confederate flag over its statehouse. And in the early 1990s he ignited a cultural war about the place of social issues in "fine art" when he staged "Still/Here," which included photographs and interviews with people suffering from terminal illnesses like AIDS and cancer. Without even seeing it, New Yorker critic Arlene Croce accused Jones, who is HIV positive, of working out his personal issues on stage and dismissed the piece as "victim art."

This season, "Still/Here Looking On" updates the work. During its performance at BAM, Jones stoked the flames with a passing reference to the feud, causing knowing, muffled laughter among those in the audience who relished the flash of the familiar provocateur.

After more than two decades, a mellower Jones is re-directing the quarrelsome questions into the formal aspects of dance, an art form he believes is inherently provocative. "Dance is one of the last places where people truly believe that the human body in and of itself is full of signifiers and deep, profound meaning," he says in a telephone interview.

Jones, 51, hopes to do with his art what he believes religion once did: organize a chaotic universe. "The people on the stage, at least on my stage - the fierceness in their bodies, their training, their generosity - have to speak about some sort of belief they have, some faith they have in the beauty in them and in this experience that they are sharing with an audience."

It's a concept he learned from his mother.

Born in Bunnell, Fla., in 1952, Jones grew up in upstate New York in Steuben County, where he was a high school track star with a love of song and storytelling.

"My first truly theatrical, transformative experience was watching my mother pray when I was very small on Christmas morning," he says. "She was able to start with a simple repeated set of words and make those words speak on the most personal, inter-family level, and then to the community, and to the whole world, and ultimately she would address her Lord, her God, in public. She was at once performing, but she was also doing something that was extremely profound and interior. That set up a wonderful paradigm that I have indirectly, and sometimes directly, been trying to approximate ever since."