Conceived and Directed by Bill T. Jones
08 Worldstage Presents
The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company
at the Enwave Theatre
April 16-19, 2008

   Narrative has always been a driving force in any full-length dance piece by Bill T. Jones, who keeps intact the company name despite having lost his partner to AIDS in 1988. Narrative is not only a crucially useful tool for sustaining interest in a piece, for adding texture or enhancing atmosphere. It also removes modern dance from an overwhelmingly abstract sphere. It humanizes dance by offering context, social or moral or psychological elements, so that dance does not become merely an interesting, but often baffling sequence of technical choreography and geometric patterns. Narrative certainly helps sustain interest in Jones’ 70-minute post-modern deconstructionist Chapel/Chapter, a dance with three interwoven narratives about violence. It is a piece that is intriguingly performed but where the pull to abstraction is offset by a narrative form, part documentary, part fantasy, that compels an audience’s voyeuristic participation without glib moral judgements.

   Bjorn G. Amelan’s set design decorates the main dance area with heavy red drapes. His dance floor is basically a white church window with black borders that divide the shape into zones that resemble a shuffle-board or rectangular cells. The audience sits all around the dance space as if in church pews. In a gallery above most of the audience, are live musicians and singers who perform the original music that is often incantatory or balladic. Chants are vocalized (with particular soprano acuity by Alicia Hall Moran) and Robert Wierzel’s lighting is both cool and sultry, morphing from grey prison-like light to hot disco neon or church radiance, and Janet Wong’s videography conjures up illusions of fluttering butterflies or transcripts or a spinning globe. The narrative concerns three cases of violence: the random mass murder of the Soto family; the abuse and murder of a young “troubled” girl; and the suicide of one of the dancer’s boyhood chums at the age of 11. These stories, told in fragments that are meant to wedge together, have an over-layer of the prison or court system, represented by mime before the actual dance as five men, several with shaved heads and all acting like slow zombies in orange boiler-suits, are prevented from leaving their white ground by guards in blue or black. In the course of the narrative(s), the voice-overs are those of prosecutors and witnesses, forensic experts and jailed inmates, in addition to those of the storytellers/characters themselves. Sections of the court transcripts are projected on the white floor from time to time, along with a famous proverb and its multiple variations: “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

   This proverb launches many of the “improv” dances—almost as if a sophisticated game of dance charades was in progress—and to which the audience serves as witnesses or voyeurs. However, this propulsion or impulsion has a built-in problem: it turns something intrinsically horrifying and serious into a “game” or sensational spectacle, and it locks the dancers into a grid of movement based on a ponderous linguistic and alphabetic conception or a virtually yogic meditativeness. Jones has described in interviews how he rehearsed the piece by compelling his dancers to spell out phrases using the alphabet he projected on the dance floor. This method has bred dances that are sometimes repetitively spastic or loose, and that often seem artificially segmented rather than organically linked, though there is no denying the dynamic kaleidoscopic blooming of sections, especially in the Soto family ensembles (rivettingly performed by Antonio Brown as Junior, Asli Bulbul as Josephine, Leah Cox as Mrs. Soto, Charles Scott as Mr. Soto, and Erick Montes as the family dog), and other sections where every single dancer (from Peter Chamberlin as The Killer and Maija Garcia as Little Girl to Andrea Smith as Father to Little Girl and Shayla-Vie Jenkins as Little Girl’s Mother) is splendid within the boundaries of Jones’ conception.   

photo: Paul B. Goode


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