Documentary explores the creation and legacy of Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company’s D-Man in the Waters (photo courtesy Rosalynde LeBlanc)
CAN YOU BRING IT: BILL T. JONES AND D-MAN IN THE WATERS (Rosalynde LeBlanc & Tom Hurwitz, 2020)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Friday, July 16
212-727-8110
www.d-mandocumentary.com
filmforum.org
In 1989, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company presented the world premiere of D-Man in the Waters at the prestigious Joyce Theater in New York City, a physically demanding, emotional work born out of the AIDS crisis, dealing with tragedy and loss in the wake of the death of Zane, Jones’s personal and professional partner, at the age of thirty-nine in 1988. Directors Rosalynde LeBlanc and Tom Hurwitz take a deep dive into the history of the dance and its lasting impact more than thirty years later in the captivating documentary Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters, opening July 16 at Film Forum.
“What is D-Man? Is it alive now? Is it a cautionary tale? Is it one of inspiration?” Jones tells fifteen Loyola Marymount dancers who are staging the piece under the direction of LeBlanc, a former company member who runs the Jones/Zane Educational Partnership at the school, where she is an associate professor in the Department of Dance. Jones continues, “Makes you want to get all your shit together, your community together, take responsibility, be beautiful, be fierce — is that what it is? I don’t know what it is. . . . What do they share that is so big, so tragic that you need a piece like this to move it and give it body?”
LeBlanc, who also produced the film, and two-time Emmy-winning cinematographer Hurwitz, the son of longtime Martha Graham dancer, choreographer, and teacher Jane Dudley, talk to most of the original cast of D-Man, many of whom have gone on to form their own companies: Arthur Avilés, Seán Curran, Lawrence Goldhuber, Gregg Hubbard, Heidi Latsky, Janet Lilly, and Betsy McCracken, who, along with Jones and his sister Johari Briggs, share intimate stories of working with Jones and Zane and the importance of the piece as the arts community was being ravaged by AIDS. Sometimes holding back tears, they speak lovingly of Zane and Demian Acquavella, nicknamed “D-Man,” who died at the age of thirty-two in 1990. “He was always a boy, but always a bit of a devilish boy, and the dancing was also that way,” Jones remembers.
Through new and old interviews, home video and archival photographs, and exciting footage from the dance’s original rehearsals and Joyce premiere, LeBlanc, Hurwitz, and editor Ann Collins choreograph a gracefully flowing, compelling narrative as the documentary participants discuss specific movements — Latsky’s attempts at a jump and Curran’s memories of a duet with Acquavella in which their foreheads have to keep touching are wonderful — and LeBlanc tries to reach inside the Loyola Marymount performers to motivate them. They might have the movement down, but D-Man requires more than that to be successful. “Do you dare to let the stakes really be high?” she asks as they search for contemporary issues that impact them similarly to how AIDS affected the creation of the work, which is set to Felix Mendelssohn’s 1825 Octet for Strings, which the German composer wrote at the age of sixteen. “There was some healing, cathartic ritual in the making and the doing of this dance that sustained us,” Curran says, a feeling LeBlanc wants to instill in the college students.
“This work is not about anybody’s epidemic,” Jones, a Kennedy Center Honoree, MacArthur Grant awardee, and Tony winner who is the artistic director of New York Live Arts, said in a statement about the film. “It is about the dark spirit of what is happening in the world and how you push back against it.” Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters gets to the heart of that spirit by revealing the legacy, and the future, of a seminal dance piece that continues to find its place on an ever-evolving planet.
LeBlanc and Hurwitz will be at Film Forum to discuss the film at the 7:00 shows on July 16 and 17 and will participate in a live, virtual Q&A with Jones at 8:00 on July 21. Jones, whose riveting Afterwardsness at Park Avenue Armory in May explored the Covid-19 pandemic, isolation, and racial injustice, will return to the space this fall with Deep Blue Sea, a monumental work for more than one hundred community members and dancers that begins with a solo by Jones and incorporates texts by Martin Luther King Jr. and Herman Melville, with water again playing a critical role.