Using multimedia components and spoken text, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company maps out a terrain of doubt, hope and wonder.
By: Susan Van Dongen
Choreographer and dancer Bill T. Jones is well-read and well-versed in philosophy, politics and history and has a passion for current events as they play out nationally and internationally. Born in 1952, he was raised in the crucible of the civil rights struggle, a time, as he says, when life demanded that you watch the evening news with a point of view. That was "…just part of what it meant to grow up in America and be a free person," Mr. Jones says.
That experience has given him the vision to understand the roots of today’s conflicts and unrest, and the dismay at the way certain political, religious and moral currents run counter to the writings of the founding fathers. It is also why he is chagrined when his young dancers and students seem so apathetic.
"I’m surprised sometimes to meet young people who have no respect for history, no curiosity about things that don’t affect them in their daily lives," Mr. Jones says. "They’re fooling themselves, though, to think that these issues don’t affect them."
"I’d be bullying, and I’d try to make them take positions and accuse them of being apolitical," Mr. Jones said in a 2005 interview in The New York Times. "I’d ask them, ‘Why do you think you have the luxury to be a modern dancer? What are you doing in this company?’"
For his latest work, Blind Date, Mr. Jones queried his dancers and got them to think about their place in the world, not just in the rarefied universe of performing arts, but as Americans. Their musings both spoken and danced became part of Blind Date as it grew and transformed. These young dancers have searched their souls and created material that speaks to issues such as religious fundamentalism, political misadventures, poverty, war and the blurry meaning of "patriotism."
Described as one of Mr. Jones’ more thoughtful, more visually fluid works and urgently topical, Blind Date will be performed by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company at McCarter Theatre in Princeton May 16. The company features New Jersey natives Shayla-Vie Jenkins of Ewing and Donald C. Shorter Jr. of Edgewater Park.
Using an original score by music director Daniel Bernard Roumain, which ranges from Bach and Otis Redding to the Mexican national anthem, Blind Date employs a multimedia set by Bjorn Amelan with projected film images by Peter Nigrini and lighting by Robert Wierzel. The 90-minute piece asks bold, sensitive and subtle questions about patriotism in an increasingly dangerous world.
The meaning of honor, sacrifice and duty are explored at a time when Mr. Jones sees spiritual self-righteousness and nationalistic fervor replacing 18th century ideals of reason and humanity. Drawing on the multi-cultural and international backgrounds of his dancers, he probes their experiences and changing ideas about surviving in our current environment, transforming and endowing them with universal relevance.
Blind Date is performed to live music accompaniment by Mr. Roumain and violinist Nurit Pacht.
Mr. Jones says the title of the work was kind of a throwaway, "a trash title for a work with non-trash concerns," he says. "Maybe it was a way to be a little self-effacing, to deflate something that might seem pompous."
The name of the piece does have a certain significance. Like people meeting on a blind date, strange forces are "meeting" these days, phenomenon and ideas that might mesh, but will more likely create conflict.
"For example, the ideology that made us the children of Thomas Jefferson and the founding fathers deism, tolerance as well as separation of church and state, science as being paramount to progress," Mr. Jones says. "And now we live in an era when the waters are greatly muddied around the separation of church and state and science is under attack.
"There’s also this ‘toxic certainty,’ here and around the world," he continues. "That’s how I understand Islamic fundamentalism. We also see it here with our right wing fundamentalism, and there’s even some of that in left wing politics too. There are many things like this that were going on in my head as I was trying to steward this work."
Watching 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry get smeared by the opposition’s spin machine as "unpatriotic" and "cowardly" and then watching George W. Bush defeat Mr. Kerry solidified Mr. Jones’ opinions and ideals, motivating him to create a new, politically charged work.
"I’d really thought that the values of the counterculture were moving more into the mainstream of American life," Mr. Jones said in the Times interview. "But the election really proved to me that I was wrong."
One of the most interesting things about interviewing the members of his troupe was hearing the thoughts of the dancers who are from other parts of the world. For some, the issues that were bandied about in the 2004 election are incomprehensible questions of faith, for example.
Founded in 1982, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company has been honored with numerous awards including several New York Dance and Performance Awards. In 1999, it was nominated for a Laurence Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dance in London. The company has been represented in and is the subject of many documentaries, most recently Free to Dance, produced by the American Dance Festival.
Last year Mr. Jones won three major honors the 2005 Samuel H. Scripps/American Dance Festival Award, the Harlem Renaissance Award and the Wexner Prize. He’s also been the recipient of the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (2003), a MacArthur Fellowship (1994) and a Dance Magazine Award (1993), among others. Mr. Jones has received choreographic commissions from Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Boston Ballet and the Lyon Opera Ballet, where he was resident choreographer for four years. His memoir, Last Night on Earth, was published by Pantheon Books in 1995.
The concept of eliciting ideas and material from his troupe goes back to Mr. Jones’ early days as a dancer, when he and former partner Arnie Zane were members of American Dance Asylum.
"I come from a tradition where dance was a collective, a group of people who lived together, paid the rent together," Mr. Jones says. "On a quarterly basis, each would take charge of the whole group. In other words, one person would lead and then you would move along and change that, so the leader would be in someone else’s work.
"That kind of collaborative way of working really instilled in me a great respect for the material in the work," he continues. "I sometimes say the dancers are sublime material in a sense that they are hot points of consciousness. I turn to them and say, ‘Here’s what I’m thinking, this is my problem what would you suggest we try now?’ Sometimes you get something unexpected when a young person has an idea, something that comes from ‘not knowing,’ from a fresh point of view something that can raise the work up and enrich our vocabulary."
The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company will perform Blind Date at McCarter Theatre, 91 University Place, Princeton, May 16, 8 p.m. Tickets cost $39-$42, $7 student standing room. For information, call (609) 258-2787. On the Web: www.mccarter.org. Bill T. Jones on the Web: www.billtjones.org

