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| ABOUT TRaC |
Fast TRaC Winter 2004
Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company @ BAM Your appreciation and enjoyment of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company will depend on what you demand of dance. If you require technical dexterity, precise and polished movements, and a testament to the power of the trained human body the craft of dance you will be amazed by this company's proficiency. If, however, you want sincerity, genuine emotion, and a connection with the dancers that reaches beyond their carefully choreographed movements into the realm of the heart, it is likely that you will leave the theater feeling oddly unfulfilled, disappointed, and finally cheated. There is no question that the company is marvelously skilled. As the dancers lifted each other and performed impossibly challenging choreography with total confidence, I was certainly impressed. Yet I could not help but detect a prevailing hollowness and pretension in their movements, an unfulfilled promise of meaning that turns cloudy, calmly indifferent, and intolerably self-important. The company's 20th season performance, which is playing February 3, 5 7 at the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, consists of three separate pieces of varying quality. The first work, The Gift/No God Logic, shows the profound interactions between four individuals, three men and one woman, and is the most vaguely beautiful piece of the evening. As the dancers drift around each other, fate throws them together in unpredictable combinations. Set to the music of Verdi's La Forza del Destino, the work examines the fluid and changing relationships between the four dancers as they experience love, hate, grief, and joy together. It is a highly artistic and abstract rendering of four intersecting lives. We are never shown specific situations that are the concrete causes of these emotions, yet we begin to empathize with the dancers. Out of the three performances, The Gift, choreographed by the late Arnie Zane, comes the closest to succeeding. But the music is so anticlimactic and the movements so repetitive that the emotions of the dance blend into the background until eventually they are indistinct and dull. The piece is far too long, and I often found myself wishing that the dancers would quit while they're ahead, lest their current passion dissolve into the foggy lighting. But that is what happened every time. They Were..., a piece that invokes courtly ballroom dances and the capricious and sensational mischief of Greek gods, is generally forgettable, despite cheery lighting and costumes and flowery, unclear narration by Bill T. Jones himself. Its mildly graceful choreography suggests man's carefree irresponsibility and hints at his inevitable mortality. In the hands of the company, these themes seem overwrought and redundant. The choreography expects its subject matter to support and carry it, and becomes shallow as a result. As in the first work, the dancers outstay their welcome. The Phantom Project: Still/Here Looking On is a company retrospective of sorts. Though led by Bill T. Jones, the piece also features soloists in the company. In it, Mr. Jones reviews the entire history of his company (dance by dance) and then describes his interactions with people with life-threatening illnesses. At this point, if I had been mildly stimulated and eventually bored by the previous two dances, I began to feel traces of indignation and anger at Mr. Jones's spectacle. I found his cataloguing of his repertoire extremely self-serving. Primarily though, while Mr. Jones professed to share his emotions with us, his narrative felt insubstantial and false. An enormously muscular and powerful man, Mr. Jones demanded sympathy and pity but showed no vulnerability. He tried to extract emotion from the audience but gave us none in return. He pretended to open himself up and show us his "pain" and "sickness" but his words and his movements were shut-in, affected, and self-indulgent. Mr. Jones's insistence that his choreography has an intrinsic and intimate connection with the experience of AIDS is a presumptuous claim that only accentuates the work's lack of authenticity. The dances fail as empathetic representations of AIDS. Because Mr. Jones so gamely sets up the challenge to do justice to his subject matter, it is all the more glaring when his dances don't begin to approach the sincerity that is necessary to successfully speak about so personal and emotional a topic. I would not be so critical of the company had it not been so ambitious in building up its mission and so conspicuous in falling short of it. This dance company is ultimately less affective and consequential than its self-image suggests. If you want to see a modern dance company of some very talented young dancers, by all means, check out the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. If, however, you want to feel an emotional bond with the dance you see on stage, don't patronize Bill T. Jones. Look elsewhere.
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