Tag Archives: Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company

WATCH NIGHT

Bill T. Jones leads rehearsal for upcoming Watch Night at PAC NYC (photo by Stephanie Berger)

WATCH NIGHT
Perelman Performing Arts Center (PAC NYC)
251 Fulton St.
November 3-18, $52-$138
pacnyc.org

Bill T. Jones’s home base might be New York Live Arts, where he’s the artistic director, but he stages works all over New York (and the world). In August, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company presented the free, site-specific Dance for Sunset in Brookhaven, Long Island. In April, his Deep Blue Sea dazzled audiences at Park Avenue Armory, where he debuted the immersive Afterwardsness the previous year. And last month he was back at NYLA with Curriculum II, kicking off his troupe’s forty-first season.

So it’s no surprise that he is presenting the first dance work at the brand-new Perelman Performing Arts Center (PAC NYC) in Lower Manhattan, by Ground Zero. Running November 3-18, Watch Night will explore tragedy, justice, and forgiveness in these ever-more-difficult times. The multimedia work was conceived by director and choreographer Jones and librettist/poet Marc Bamuthi Joseph; the score is by Brooklyn musician and composer Tamar-kali.

The cast features approximately two dozen dancers portraying such characters as the Wolf, Super/Natural, and members of an Echo Chamber, with an eight-person ensemble including violin, viola, cello, bass, flute, oboe, and clarinet. The set is by Tony-nominated designer Adam Rigg, with costumes by Kara Harmon, lightning by Robert Wierzel, sound by Mikaal Sulaiman, and projections by Lucy Mackinnon.

In a program note, Jones lists dos and don’ts; for example:

DO NOT:
Create an event too easily digested in its desire to succeed by standards not of my making.
Be cowed by the city and this theater site’s precarious history in our fractious era.
Be oppressed by personal fear and anger.
Try to heal the world in this event.
Ignore each character’s worldview, individual psychological motivations that give them dimension and substance.
Attempt to be understood by all viewers and stake holders.

DO:
Acknowledge the privilege of this opportunity and the platform provided by the Perelman Performing Arts Center in its Inaugural Season.
Acknowledge this event is informed by real tragedies, real people, and real consequences.
Explore the potential of this new historic theater, built on contested land and a site of trauma.
Challenge my own taste and notions of abstraction and movement.
Attempt to “see this event” through the eyes of many people — different from myself and very much like me.
Stay alert, grateful, and hungry for joy!

Jones will be on hand for two postshow talkbacks, on November 9 with Joseph, Tamar-kali, and dramaturg Lauren Whitehead, moderated by rabbinical consultant Kendell Pinkney, delving into the creative inspiration behind the show, and on November 12, when Jones and guests from the Interfaith Center of New York will discuss faith and forgiveness. In addition, on December 4, Jones will speak with Joseph at NYLA as part of the ongoing “Bill Chats” series.

In her program note, Whitehead explains, “Every massacre has its moment. In the aftermath of every staggering act of violence we are inundated, for a time, with outrage and rallying cries, marches and memorials, public lament and lengthy speeches and great groanings of grief. And then, as is our way, we metabolize the grotesque. We will ourselves into movie theaters, send our children into schools again. We weep, we wail, and then we walk on. What our show is attempting to do is to ask ‘what if?’ What if we were unsatisfied by platitudes of forgiveness and forgetting? What if instead of moving on, we pointed our rage and discontent in a different direction?”

Don’t expect any easy answers to those challenging questions in what promises to be a memorable experience.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

DEEP BLUE SEA

Bill T. Jones’s Deep Blue Sea is set within an illuminating, immersive environment at Park Ave. Armory (photo by Stephanie Berger)

DEEP BLUE SEA
Park Avenue Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
September 28 – October 9, $40
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org

Bill T. Jones is in the midst of yet another well-deserved moment, culminating in the spectacular Deep Blue Sea, continuing at Park Avenue Armory through October 9. During the pandemic, the legendary dancer, choreographer, Kennedy Center honoree, and activist, along with his troupe, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, streamed a reimagined version of 1991’s Continuous Replay. In May, after a one-month delay because of a Covid outbreak in the company, they staged Afterwardsness at Park Ave. Armory, a socially distanced and masked production that addressed racism, police brutality, classism, and the pandemic itself. In July, the documentary Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters was released, a thrilling look at Jones’s seminal 1989 piece, D-Man in the Waters, exploring intergenerational tragedy and loss while drawing comparisons between AIDS and other crises.

Delayed a year and a half due to the pandemic, Deep Blue Sea is a one-hundred-minute multimedia meditation on being Black in America. As the audience enters the Wade Thompson Drill Hall, which features a large, rectangular central space with ten rows of rafters, starting about ten feet high, on all four sides, Jones, dressed in his trademark black, is moving determinedly across the floor, almost robotically. Some people recognize him; others walk right past him to their seats, oblivious. It’s Jones’s return to performing for the first time in ten years, when he appeared (nude) in a 2011 iteration of Continuous Replay at New York Live Arts. On every seat is a long sheet of paper with writing on both sides, in Jones’s handwriting; it reads in part: “Thank you, Mr. Melville! / Thank you for the Pip / Thank you for his music / Thank you for his fragile fear / Thank you for his loneliness in the ocean . . . / Thank you for not letting him drown. / Thank you for this floor we are moving on. Thank you for the ocean just now pretending to be a stage. / Thank you, Dr. King! . . . Thank you for words that I can shred, misunderstand, mangle and still they meet the air like singing.”

Bill T. Jones stands in the middle of it all in multimedia Deep Blue Sea (photo by Stephanie Berger)

The sixty-nine-year-old Florida native soon starts a long monologue in which he explains that he was disturbed to discover that, upon revisiting Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, he had completely forgotten about Pip, the young Black cabin boy aboard the Pequod. “Pip was invisible to me,” he recalls. Using that as a metaphor, Jones, joined by ten dancers, delves into the lack of inclusivity in the word “we” in contemporary society. He incorporates text from W. E. B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Kendrick Lamar’s “Never Catch Me,” and Moby-Dick, with live gospel, blues, and hip-hop performed by vocalists Philip Bullock, Shaq Hester, Prentiss Mouton, and Stacy Penson in red costumes and Jay St. Flono in more colorful African-inspired dress. (The costumes are by Liz Prince.) The dramatic score was composed by musical director Nick Hallett, accompanied by an electronic soundscape by Hprizm aka High Priest, Rena Anakwe, and Holland Andrews.

Choreographed by Jones, Janet Wong, and the company — Barrington Hinds, Dean Michael Husted, Jada Jenai, Shane Larson, s. lumbert, Danielle Marshall, Nayaa Opong, Marie Lloyd Paspe, Jacoby Pruitt, and Huiwang Zhang — Deep Blue Sea immerses the audience in a breathtaking visual environment designed by Elizabeth Diller, of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, with award-winning projection designer Peter Nigrini (Here Lies Love, Beetlejuice); the superb lighting is by Robert Wierzel. (You can watch an artist talk with Diller, Nigrini, and Hinds here.) I suggest wearing a white or light-blue mask for an added bonus when it gets dark.

The surprises are many, from a black spotlight following Jones to white spotlights on the other dancers that merge into amorphous bubbles, from mirrors that turn the space into a kind of three-dimensional infinity room to the appearance of a calming, gently rolling ocean. Snippets of text roll beneath the dancers. The face of a boy representing Pip dominates the floor, blinking up at us. Jones refers to the dancers by name several times, giving each their own identity and voice. Wearing everyday clothing, they run across the stage, form into a tight group, and line up on their backs, asserting themselves as individuals and a close-knit group. Jones expands the idea of community with an overly long though visually engaging conclusion in which ninety-nine local people share personal statements that begin, “I know . . . ,” after which the audience is encouraged to come down and mingle, becoming an ever-expanding “we.”

“[Pip] saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad,” Melville writes in Moby-Dick. “So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.” At one point in Deep Blue Sea, the phrase “You can’t turn back” is projected onto the floor, Jones’s uncompromising approach to providing a way forward through indifference.

CAN YOU BRING IT: BILL T. JONES AND D-MAN IN THE WATERS

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.

SOCIAL DISTANCE HALL: AFTERWARDSNESS

Performers move throughout Park Avenue Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall in Afterwardsness (photo by Stephanie Berger)

AFTERWARDSNESS
Park Ave. Armory
643 Park Ave. at Sixty-Seventh St.
May 19-26, $45
www.armoryonpark.org

Bill T. Jones and Janet Wong have given us the first great indoor, in-person, live dance presentation of and about the pandemic and the social justice movement. Running May 19-26 at Park Avenue Armory, Afterwardsness takes place in the building’s massive fifty-five-thousand-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall, where one hundred audience members are marched in formation to their seats, arranged six feet apart from one another throughout the space. In the center is a large rectangle bordered by yellow tape, evoking caution, while a twisting path in blue (representing police and authority?) is situated on the floor around the chairs, ensuring the performers keep a safe distance from the viewers. (Part of the armory’s Social Distance Hall programming, the production itself was postponed last month when several cast and crew members tested positive for Covid.)

The sixty-five minute show, named for Sigmund Freud’s concept of “a mode of belated understanding or retroactive attribution of sexual or traumatic meaning to earlier events,” is a complex web of physical and emotional pain and fear, performed by eight masked and barefoot dancers wearing sweatpants and T-shirts or tank tops — Barrington Hinds, Chanel Howard, Dean Husted, Shane Larson, s. lumbert, Marie Lloyd Paspe, Nayaa Opong, and Huiwang Zhang — along with Vinson Fraley Jr., who is dressed all in white from head to ankle, as if he were a kind of spiritual leader or ghostly apparition; all are members of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company. They run, roll, jump, walk, tumble, squirm, wriggle, grasp their hands behind their backs, and raise their arms above their heads like they’re under arrest, never touching each other nor making eye contact with the audience. There’s so much happening at any one moment that it’s impossible to take it all in, as if you’re at a protest rally, not knowing where to look.

Bill T. Jones and Janet Wong’s Afterwardsnesstakes an emotional, powerful look at the last fourteen months in America (photo by Stephanie Berger)

The soundtrack is dazzling, featuring avant-garde jazz, snippets of familiar tunes (for example, “Dixie” and “Yankee Doodle,” which both deal with class and race issues), abstract sounds, brief quotes from Jones and members of the company that can’t always be understood, excerpts from Olivier Messaien’s 1941 chamber piece Quartet for the End of Time, written while he was a POW in a German prison, and occasional grunts and noises (and a nursery rhyme). Standing alone in the yellow rectangle, music director Pauline Kim Harris plays the gorgeous, elegiac 8:46 violin solo “Homage,” a tribute to George Floyd; clarinetist Paul Wonjin Cho and others perform from wooden lifeguard chairs; composer Holland Andrews contributes a new song and vocals, including stating the date, beginning with March 13 and continuing through May 19, in one corner with Cho, pianist Vicky Chow, and cellist Caleb van der Swaagh; and the score includes original compositions from Fraley Jr. and Howard, repeating powerful phrases about suppression and murder that echo through the hall. The immersive sound design is by Mark Grey.

Brian H. Scott’s lighting design is a marvel, shifting from bright and airy to dark and ominous. At times he lights only the straight and curved pathways followed by the dancers, tracing the blue lines. He uses spotlights to elicit giant shadows and creates small boxes that trap the dancers, capturing Jones’s strong choreographic language, which ranges from confinement and isolation to freedom and hope. In the grand finale, the performers grab chairs but are hesitant to merely sit in them and watch; their jittery energy makes the audience uncomfortable but fascinated. Afterwardsness is not a dire, depressing fugue for these past fourteen months; it is both a compelling reminder of what has unfolded across America as well as a beautiful yet urgent call to action.

AFTERWARDSNESS

AFTERWARDSNESS
Park Ave. Armory
643 Park Ave. at Sixty-Seventh St.
May 19-26, $45 (limited tickets go on sale April 1)
www.armoryonpark.org

I’ve been tentative about the return of live, indoor music, dance, and theater, wondering how comfortable I would feel in an enclosed area with other audience members and onstage performers. Many of my colleagues who cover the arts are steadfastly against going to shows right now as things open up, while others have been having a ball going to the movies and eating inside. But when I received my invitation to see Afterwardsness at the Park Avenue Armory on March 24, I surprised myself with how much immediate glee I felt, how instantly exhilarated I was to finally, at last, see a show, in the same space with actual human beings. But my excitement was broken when it was announced that several members of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company had tested positive for Covid-19 and the show, which had sold out quickly, had to be postponed. But now it’s back as part of the Armory’s Social Distance Hall season, running May 19 to 26; original ticket holders will get first dibs, with remaining tickets going on sale to the general public April 1. “Creating new, body-based work at a time when physical proximity is discouraged is no small feat,” Jones said in a statement. “However, as is often the case when artists are forced to push through limitations, this is when things get really good. Having the drill hall, this grand and glorious space to create and dance in, was quite liberating. The armory is a space like no other in New York City—and if it’s like no other in New York City, then it’s pretty unique in the world.”

The sixty-five minute show, named for Freud’s concept of “a mode of belated understanding or retroactive attribution of sexual or traumatic meaning to earlier events,” will take place in the fifty-five-thousand-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall, where one hundred audience members will be seated in chairs nine to twelve feet apart in all directions as the action unfolds around them. The hall has been updated with air-refreshing methods that exceed CDC and ASHRAE standards; there will be onsite testing and strict masking and social distancing policies. The work explores the isolation felt during the pandemic as well as the impact of the George Floyd protests and BLM movement. The choreography is by Tony winner Jones, with a new vocal composition by Holland Andrews, whose Museum of Calm recently streamed through the Baryshnikov Arts Center. Musical director Pauline Kim Harris will perform the violin solo “8:46” in tribute to Floyd, and there will also be new compositions by company members Vinson Fraley Jr. and Chanel Howard as well as excerpts from Olivier Messaien’s 1941 chamber piece Quartet for the End of Time, written while he was a POW in a German prison. The lighting is by Brian H. Scott, with sound by Mark Grey. The inaugural program at the armory is now Social! The Social Distance Dance Club, a collaboration between Steven Hoggett, Christine Jones, and David Byrne that runs April 9-22 and gives each audience member their own spotlight in which to move to choreography by Yasmine Lee.

LIVE ARTERY 2021

LIVE ARTERY 2021
New York Live Arts
January 9-12, $5 ($15 for all four shows)
newyorklivearts.org

Every January, New York Live Arts brings us “Live Artery,” a collection of movement-based works in conjunction with the annual APAP conference, where dance fans and members of the Association of Performing Arts Professionals can watch the latest of what’s happening in the dance community. This year’s tenth anniversary will be virtual, with four pieces open to the public.

Kicking things off on January 9 is Kimberly Bartosik / dalea’s through the mirror of their eyes, a fifty-minute Bessie nominee featuring Joanna Kotze, Dylan Crossman, and Burr Johnson, with music by Sivan Jacobovitz; the work, which begins in a storm, premiered at NYLA in March 2020. On January 10 at 7:30, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company asks the always pertinent question What Problem? The eighty-five-minute piece is adapted from the 2020 epic Deep Blue Sea and is choreographed by NYLA artistic director and cofounder Bill T. Jones, Janet Wong, and the company, with an original score by Nick Hallett. It incorporates elements of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, a quote from W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick while exploring issues of community, isolation, and political division.

On January 11 at 7:30, “Primetime” streams Alexandra Chasin and Zishan Ugurlu’s Fragments, Lists & Lacunae, which ran at NYLA in February 2020. The two-hour multimedia work is led by Judith Butler as a professor teaching students Hailey Marmolejo, Aigner Mizzelle, and Jackie Rivera some valuable lessons about the world and life over the course of nine lectures. And on January 12 at 7:30, the one and only Raja Feather Kelly follows up his 2018 Ugly with Hysteria, another campy dance-theater mashup that takes on pop culture and sociopolitical and deeply personal (and extraterrestrial) issues. The piece premiered last month, online and in NYLA’s glassed-in gallery space, where people could watch from outside.

APAP presenters also have access to “Close Encounters” January 10-12 at 11:30 am with such creators as Holly Bass, Christopher Williams, Charlotte Brathwaite, Faye Driscoll, Vanessa Anspaugh, Emily Johnson, Bartosik, Kelly, Jones, and others. These sessions will stream in the customized 3D environment Interspace; NYLA has already been hosting the interactive and immersive “EdgeCut” series on the Nowhere platform, which bodes well for this program.

THE HOUSE PARTY WITH EVERYBOOTY

house party 2

Who: Andre J., Tyler Ashley (aka the Dauphine of Bushwick), Raja Feather Kelly, Bill T. Jones, Migguel Anggelo, Bubble_T, DJ Shirine Saad’s Gyal Tings, the House of LaBeija, the Illustrious Blacks, OOPS!, RAGGA NYC, Papi Juice, Switch n’ Play
What: Virtual Pride party
Where: BAM, New York Live Arts
When: Saturday, June 27, free (donations accepted), 8:00
Why: BAM and New York Live Arts will celebrate Pride together with the virtual House Party with Everybooty. The livestreamed event, taking place June 27 at 8:00, was inspired by a creator they have in common: dancer, choreographer, and activist Bill T. Jones, NYLA’s artistic director and whose troupe, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, has been performing at BAM for more than three dozen years. The festivities will include music, dance, storytelling, drag, video collages, and more by a diverse group of queer performance artists, musicians, dancers, choreographers, and more. Among the participants in the eighth annual Everybooty are Tyler Ashley (aka the Dauphine of Bushwick), Raja Feather Kelly, Migguel Anggelo, Bubble_T, DJ Shirine Saad’s Gyal Tings, the House of LaBeija, the Illustrious Blacks, and Papi Juice. In addition, beginning June 25, BAM will be streaming twelve archival works by Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, from Secret Pastures (1984), The Animal Trilogy (1986), A Letter to My Nephew (2017) and Still/Here (1994) to We Set Out Early . . . Visibility Was Poor (1998), The Flight Project (2003), A Rite (2013), and A Quarreling Pair (2008). “BAM and Live Arts stand proud of their LGBTQIA legacies and in solidarity with those fighting to dismantle systemic racism and end violence against Black and brown people,” the two organizations said in a statement. The party is free, but donations will be accepted, with proceeds split between Callen-Lorde Community Health Center, GRIOT Circle, and Black Trans Femmes in the Arts.