A patriotic movement

BY almost every measure, 2007 has been a good, if hectic, year for postmodern choreographer Bill T. Jones, who will bring his topical evening-length meditation on patriotism, “Blind Date,” to UCLA’s Royce Hall next weekend.

Apart from touring almost nonstop with the Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane Dance Company, Jones, 55, was inducted in June into the Hall of Fame at the National Museum of Dance in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. Less than a week before that, he was awarded a Tony for his work on the Broadway hit “Spring Awakening.” And lately, members of his company can be seen in fashion magazines exuberantly leaping across Puma’s fall ad campaign.

All of this represents an ironic turn for a choreographer more often described as a provocateur. Recalling his Tony acceptance speech recently, Jones said, “In that 90 seconds, probably more people became aware of me and my identity as a choreographer than in my entire career in the art world.” About 6.25 million people, in fact.

“That was powerful,” he mused, before quickly adding, “but it’s all relative.”

Speaking by phone from his home in upstate New York just days after returning from Taiwan, where his globe-trotting ensemble was the first U.S. modern dance company to perform in eight years, Jones then recalled his reentry into this country to illustrate his point. “Coming through security in Seattle, [an] official asked who we were, where we’d been, what we’d been doing. When I explained, he said, ‘Never heard of you.’ ”

Yet Jones is no stranger to the spotlight. It’s just that his presence in it stems as much from controversy as from acclaim. In 2000, he became the media’s poster child for an NAACP tourism boycott of South Carolina when he pulled out of the Spoleto Festival USA to protest the presence of the Confederate battle flag atop the Statehouse.

Jones wasn’t the only artist to honor the boycott, but he was the first. Spoleto general director Nigel Redden, who has known him for almost 30 years, says now that the timing had more to do with contract negotiations than with political zeal. But public reaction was swift: Of course.

Of course Jones, who in his work has confronted such divisive issues as racism, sexuality, AIDS and war, would be the first artist to take action.

This image of Jones doesn’t surprise Jedediah Wheeler, executive director of arts and cultural programming for Montclair State University in New Jersey, where Jones and his company have been in residence this fall.

“I subscribe to the idea that it’s our artists that are our shamans,” Wheeler said. “They’re the ones that can really see who we are when we refuse to look or are unable or unwilling. That’s what Bill does. He sees. And he acts on what he sees.”

Wheeler, who considers Jones a “creative activist” as well as “proudly American,” co-commissioned “Blind Date,” which premiered at Montclair State in 2005. The multimedia piece interweaves anecdotes by members of the troupe about, for instance, learning the national anthem with dance segments set to Bach, Otis Redding, R. Kelly and selections by company music director Daniel Bernard Roumain. The result questions such Enlightenment values as tolerance in an age of what Jones calls “toxic certainty” and is “a very American work,” according to Wheeler. “Instead of being antiwar, Bill is celebrating patriotism and questioning it at the same time.”

Redden and Wheeler frequently use the word “engaged” to describe Jones. Wheeler said, “There’s no other artist that I know of who wants to have a literal and figurative dialogue with an audience as much as Bill.”

Though “Blind Date” has not incurred the vehement backlash of earlier Jones pieces (such as the illness-and-survival-themed “Still/Here”), the choreographer’s predilection for engagement was evident during the curtain call when it opened at the 2006 Spoleto Festival. As applause died down and the company exited the stage, a lone audience member in the balcony booed. Jones sped back onstage, angrily demanding to know who had booed and why.

The man (identified as David Holt in the Charleston, S.C., Post and Courier) refused to come down to the stage and engage in a debate with Jones. Instead, in what was described in the press and on the festival blog as a tense moment, a heated exchange ensued between him and Jones about the relation of aesthetics to politics.

Looking back, Jones characterizes the incident as heckling. But Redden said, “This is who he is. He is a proponent of free speech, and audiences get to do that too.” Still, Jones recoils at the ease with which the word “political” is thrown at his work: “It’s a loaded term, and a bankrupt one.

“If one is not going to subscribe to the cult of aesthetic beauty on which the art world is founded, then what is one’s position in the context of the culture?” he asked. “For me, the poetry has to do with pressing against social convention. Whether you call it political or ethical, I am very interested in the Buddhist concept of right action: What is the right thing to do?”

At the same time, Jones is slowly adjusting to his new commercially viable profile. Unlike in the modern dance world, where a choreographer’s reputation is cemented by an idiosyncratic movement style, he has now been approached to create salable products with broad appeal. So far, the only project he has signed on to is a show about Nigerian Afrobeat pioneer and political activist Fela Kuti. “Quite frankly,” he said, “a lot of it seems like enough rope to hang myself.”

Still, juggling the demands of the for-profit and nonprofit arenas has led Jones to contemplate anew the relevance of modern dance.

“Those of us still trying to stay true to this notion of American modern dance sometimes feel not quite appreciated by the culture at large,” he said. “Let’s face it, mass culture is consumed with the Internet and with huge numbers -- blockbuster this, blockbuster that.”

Jones’ company of 22 years remains his primary community and foremost priority. (He founded it with Zane, his performing and life partner, who died of AIDS-related lymphoma in 1988.) Currently its board of directors is working to establish a permanent home in Harlem that would include the troupe’s own theater as well as studio space. Jones envisions a cultural center and think tank, a locus for bringing artists, writers and intellectuals together across disciplines. Though an actual site is still a few years away, Jones is laying the conceptual foundation this fall with a series of moderated discussions at Harlem Stage, a presenting organization in upper Manhattan.

This fall will also see the company premiere of “A Quarreling Pair,” an evening-length work based on an absurdist puppet play with the same title by Jane Bowles. It will be at Montclair State in November -- less than a week after Jones returns from Paris, where he is scheduled to premiere a one-time, site-specific solo at the Louvre.

On the telephone, however, Jones was focusing on his immediate future, a “performance address” he was to give the Montclair student body the following day. “How do I make the case that art can do it all?” he asked. “That it can present a vision of transcendent beauty and poetry and it can also talk about our common dilemmas, our common challenges of being citizens?

“This is the Internet generation, which is easily embarrassed by the romanticism of the live arts. I want to grab them by the collar and say, ‘Look, I understand funk and alienation, but I also have this high-mindedness about purpose and meaning. I’ve given my life to this. What are you giving your life to?’ ”

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Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane Dance Company

Where: Royce Hall, UCLA, Westwood

When: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday

Price: $24 to $48

Contact: (310) 825-2101 or www.uclalive.org