"...you’ll never forget it."

October1, 2004 performance reviewed by Connell McGrath

Bill T. Jones does not pander to his audience. He pushes our boundaries and forces us to consider our beliefs and assumptions. He makes us question ourselves and our behavior, and in the wider industry of American entertainment that’s usually considered unentertaining. He comes with his company—the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company—to Mass MoCA this weekend to present The Phantom Project, a set of three pieces not to entertain but to edify, uplift, to bring joy and to stir up a little trouble.

One of the company’s missions is to keep the work of its founder, Arnie Zane, in the public eye. And so the first piece performed by the company is Zane’s Continuous Replay, and it’s as fresh and relevant today as it was 27 years ago. It was originally performed by Zane as a solo in 1977, then as a duet with Bill T. a year later. Jones then restaged it as an ensemble work in 1989. It is based on a sequence of 45 hand and arm gestures. “The dance is a rational accumulation [of these gestures] that serves as the ground for a structured improvisation.” So say the liner notes. What the liner notes don’t say is that the company spends much of the time during the piece naked, and so provokes the audience into considering nudity, isolation, embarrassment, the objectification of the body. We are provoked to examine our behavior and beliefs around these many issues.

The piece begins almost comically with a single male dancer, this evening courageously performed by Erick Montes, running out on stage, doing a quick gesture and bolting for the curtains again. “I think he forgot something,” one audience member whispered, perhaps referring to his costume. This beginning has the uncomfortable overtone of those anxiety/insecurity dreams in which we find ourselves naked in public. He comes out of the wings again and takes a position toward the back of the stage and slowly turns his head to look at us full on, confronting us.

Was 1977 the year of the streaker? Well, there are streakers in Continuous Replay. A dancer will tear-ass (forgive me) across the stage, circle behind the backdrop, and walk out calmly to take his or her place among the performers who are executing a set of abstract gestures and movements. A thought-provoking aspect of this streaking is that the streakers are passing other naked people on the stage; picture clothed streakers passing other clothed pedestrians and you’ll see the incongruity. What’s strange or provoking about nudity when everyone’s nude? There is a statement here, I think, about we’re-all-in-this-together. We’re all naked, or vulnerable or embarrassed—whatever nudity provokes inside each of us. Much of Replay points us toward universality; are we in isolation or are we together?

As the piece unfolds, we quickly “normalize” the nudity and relax with it, and we give ourselves permission to watch and enjoy these beautiful bodies in their considerable variety moving and in stillness. Somehow we’ve never seen dancers before, with all that leotard and tights, drawstring pants and sleeveless tops. Now we can see them and they are beautiful. It’s not sexual but it’s very pleasing.

Forgive me for belaboring the nudity of this piece, but it is a striking element of the work, and the “provocative” aspect—the touch that elevates this work from very good abstract dance to exceptional art with a bewildering spectrum of messages contingent on what each observer comes to it with. The choreography is still fresh and original after two and a half decades, and the music is reinvented with fine mastery and creativity by DJ Spooky, mixed live. Special acknowledgement to Erick Montes, who spends the whole piece on stage, repeating the base gestures with precision and humility, leading the ensemble and anchoring their improvisations like a well-made human metronome.

Next comes the piece Mercy 10x8 on a Circle, choreographed by Jones in 2003 the same year as he made his larger, better-known work Reading, Mercy and The Artificial Nigger. Mercy 10x8 seems to be the abstract, dancerly version of Reading. It is a beautifully choreographed work performed by the whole ensemble in stripped down versions of the costumes they wear in Reading; suit pants, dress shirts and suspenders. They dance to Glenn Gould’s fine interpretation of Beethoven’s 32 Variations on an Original Theme in C Minor. Mercy 10x8 is an accomplished work of abstract dance by a master choreographer drawing on decades of experience and considerable personal gifts. There is a clear and original vocabulary of movement here, and many memorable passages, particularly between the two lead dancers. With the exception of a few gestures that imply violence and power and control of one person over another, this work has none of the incendiary quality of Replay or Artificial Nigger. It stands alone as a great piece of contemporary dance.

After intermission comes the much-written-about piece Reading, Mercy and The Artificial Nigger, based on the Flannery O’Connor story The Artificial Nigger. This is a profound, moving and disturbing multimedia work. On opening night Bill T. Jones read the story along with Rachel Lee Harris, and on subsequent nights Ryan Hilliard took Jones’s place. They are accompanied by an original soundtrack by Daniel Bernard Roumain, and a video of hand shadows by Gregory Bain and Leonard Eisenberg. The ensemble performed an interesting parallel story as the O’Connor is read aloud.

After seeing Reading, the earlier piece Mercy 10x8 takes on new meaning as an abstract exploration of the ideas in the O’Connor story. Taken together, the two pieces form a more complete picture of this artistic effort to bring the O’Connor to life through dance.

The O’Connor story is a sad and disturbing tale of a man’s betrayal of his grandson. It is a story about how adults pass on their anger, shame and isolation to their children, and how those lessons lead to cultural attitudes such as racism. Jones wisely leaves the “lessons” up to the storytelling, and seeks to add something of his own in the dance. As usual, he chooses not to express the strong feeling of the story through emotional or dramatic dance, and instead relies on his broad vocabulary of abstract movement. At times the dancers physically mimic the events of the story, but don’t act them out. Jones seeks to “universalize” the story, broadening its context beyond southern white society and racism, and applying the ideas of the story to any and all people.

In an interview given to Fletcher Roberts of the New York Times in February, 2004, just before the New York premiere of the work, he states: “I contend that I am simply an artist making meaning out of the language of the era that has formed me. When you look at my stage, what you see is every kind of combination of Mr. Head and Nelson [the two main characters from the O’Connor story]. A tall blond woman and a short black woman, a tall black man and a short white woman, a tall Russian man and a shorter Chinese man. You have to ask, are you living in the same world as Flannery O’Connor? Are there niggers on that stage? Or are niggers no longer even the point?” Jones’s recontexting of the O’Connor story points the way to the more universal meanings, that we all may have suffered or perpetrated such betrayals and such lessons.

In all, this moving, pleasing, disturbing evening of multi-racial, multimedia performance broadens boundaries in all directions. It continually leads back to the unsettling idea that this applies to us, too. We are not exempt from these attitudes and failings. Fortunately, neither are we exempt from this beauty and grace. It is in this gift for provoking introspection that Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company leaves its most enduring artistic mark. As we were leaving the performance, I said to my wife, “I don’t know that I was ready to see that last piece, it was hard to watch!” And she replied, “But you’ll never forget it.”