COVER STORY : Mortal Combat : Choreographer Bill T. Jones kicked off a war of words with ‘Still/Here,’ an exploration of mortality that some called ‘victim art.’ Get ready for Round 2.

His hand, like King Lear’s, “smells of mortality.”

He lost his longtime partner to AIDS in 1988 and has been HIV-positive himself for a decade.

He has made several dance-theater works dealing with AIDS and death.

His most recent piece was inspired by the stories of people with life-threatening illnesses.

He has been called a maker of “victim art.”

He, of course, is choreographer Bill T. Jones--best known to those who didn’t know him before as the artist whose interdisciplinary dance work “Still/Here” sent shock waves through the media and beyond when it had its U.S. premiere in New York in November.

The work, which, in addition to dance, includes video segments of people who have been diagnosed as terminally ill, became the center of an ongoing debate about “victim art,” sparked by a commentary by Arlene Croce in the Dec. 26-Jan. 2 issue of the New Yorker. Croce, the magazine’s longtime dance critic, refused to see or review “Still/Here” on the grounds that its subject and treatment placed it outside the boundaries of criticism. Many heated responses followed in an array of publications.

Jones stayed silent amid the outcry for months. Only recently has he begun to talk about it. “I’m sitting here today and I can’t refer to the piece unless I talk specifically about what that article wasn’t saying,” says the dulcet-voiced Jones, seated in the cozy lobby of a Berkeley hotel during a late February tour stop.

“The biggest issue was that (“Still/Here”) used people who were dealing with life-threatening illness, therefore it was reportage, not art,” says Jones. “It was (as if) that was the first time someone’s ever used an interview format to inform a work of art.”

“Still/Here”--or, rather, the idea of it--has become a lightning rod for discussion. Perhaps more important, though, the current debate has provided the final confirmation that Jones--who is African American, gay, avant-garde and always outspoken--is a major symbol for a cultural moment fraught with anxiety.

On Thursday and Friday, Los Angeles will have its first chance to see “Still/Here.” The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company will perform the work (including pre-performance talks by Jones) at the Wiltern Theatre, presented by UCLA’s Center for the Performing Arts. And on Saturday, Jones will join fellow interdisciplinary choreographer David Rousseve for a panel discussion at UCLA.

No doubt Croce’s commentary will be a major topic. It has brought Jones and his company an unprecedented amount of attention. But it should be noted that Jones was already on a roll--last Oct. 10 he was on the cover of Time magazine, long before Croce’s article even appeared.

A MacArthur Foundation “genius” award recipient, Jones, 43, has won two Bessies--the prestigious New York awards for dance and performance art--and many other prizes. He still dances occasionally, but his role is primarily as a choreographer these days: He has choreographed numerous works for his own 13-year-old company, as well as for Alvin Ailey and various ballet troupes. And currently, Jones is resident choreographer of France’s Lyon Opera Ballet. As he and his company continue to tour “Still/Here,” he’s completing an array of projects, including a TV version of “Still/Here” and an autobiographical book due out in June.

Yet some things remain constant. Jones is continuing to search for the same things he has always sought--a sense of identity and community--and in that quest, too, he is characteristic of his generation of artists.

“I try to find a way that I can enter joyously into the social discourse and find the light,” says the charismatic and contemplative Jones. “ ‘Still/Here’ has taken me to the depths and the heights of my own personal universe. I’m challenging the value system as a survival technique. Sometimes it may take making radical things to do that.”

Portly dancer Lawrence Goldhuber, dressed in pale silk pajamas, recounts the tale of his late mother’s illness and chemotherapy in voice-over as his onstage movements give form to remembered pain.

“I’ve seen a lot of this kind of death recently,” Goldhuber’s voice says as he dances a gestural passage of surprising grace. “You know, the slow bit-by-bit kind.”

Later, the long-legged and impossibly lithe dancer, Odile Reine-Adelaide, clutches one of her breasts as she moves, again and again, in an almost violent motion. A song plays and a woman’s voice speaks on tape, telling of a bout with breast cancer and the feeling of incompleteness in the disease’s wake.

Still later, a group of 10 dancers of varied shapes and sizes comes together, drawn by a video monitor rolling slowly across the floor and playing a tape on which Jones is asking a litany of questions.

“What color were her eyes?” the choreographer’s visage asks an unseen interviewee. “White or black? Can you picture your death? Can you own it and be responsible for it?”

These are but a few moments in the two-hour multimedia dance piece choreographed and directed by Jones. “Still/Here,” which is performed by his company of five men and five women, features an original score by Kenneth Frazelle, music by rock guitarist Vernon Reid (who will perform live at the Wiltern) and video by Gretchen Bender.

“Still/Here” began in a series of Survival Workshops that Jones held for people with, or who had survived, terminal illnesses. The four-hour sessions took place in 11 U.S. cities throughout 1992.

“I wanted to go to a group of people who had decided that life is worth living,” he says. “I had heard plenty of the other, the arrogance of the well.”

Primarily, he was trolling for material, as he told the participants. “I needed to go to other people living with the struggle to understand mortality,” Jones says.

Jones asked the men and women--who ranged in age from adolescents to people in their 70s--questions about their experiences, fears and fantasies. He suggested exercises, sometimes having each person dance a movement to describe themselves, and videotaped question-and-answer sessions with the participants.

The exercises provided the raw alphabet of a choreography. “The arm gestures from people in the workshops have been treated sometimes irreverently so that we wouldn’t recognize where they came from, and other times in a ceremonial way to underscore their specialness,” Jones says.

In some cases, movement sequences were appropriated as found dance. “The karate actually came from young Jason in the workshop,” Jones says. “That was his shape that was descriptive of himself.”

The taped interviews were edited into a collage that plays on large monitors during “Still/Here.” Both hanging and free-standing, the screens are a pivotal visual element of the work.

In front of and sometimes near the monitors, the dancers perform a variety of vignettes--ranging from solos to group choreographies--that derive from and sometimes refer to the tales being narrated on the monitors and elsewhere.

Some sections of “Still/Here” are almost exclusively dance and others are dance-theater, mixing singing and dancing with video and other visual elements.

Jones’ aim was to find movements, words and images that would suggest a common humanity. “I set out to prove to myself what I have in common with other people, and I was going to use mortality as a way of pushing that agenda,” he says.

“Still/Here” had its premiere in Lyon last September. In November, it came to the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Writing in the New York Times, Anna Kisselgoff called “Still/Here” “a major and often startling new mixed-media piece . . . about nothing but human feelings. . . .”

Of course, the response from those who actually saw the work has been noticed less than that of those who didn’t.

The ongoing controversy surrounding “Still/Here” began during the work’s New York engagement, prompted by Croce.

Saying that she hadn’t seen and wouldn’t review “Still/Here,” Croce argued that works like Jones’ are beyond criticism. Because “(t)he (video) cast members of ‘Still/Here’ . . . have no choice other than to be sick,” she wrote, “they are the prime exhibits of a choreographer who has crossed the line between theatre and reality. . . .”

Croce called Jones’ work “victim art,” saying, “I can’t review someone I feel sorry for or hopeless about.”

Initially Jones steadfastly refused to respond. Major newspapers and magazines, however, started running rebuttals, counterattacks and myriad letters to the editor apropos Croce’s article.

Those who disagreed with Croce--who has been writing for the New Yorker for 22 years and wrote a piece critical of Jones as far back as 1982--have included playwright Tony Kushner, New York Times Op-Ed columnist Frank Rich and novelist Joyce Carol Oates. Those who have come to Croce’s defense include art critic Hilton Kramer and authors Camille Paglia and Susan Sontag.

Time magazine dubbed the brouhaha the biggest “fracas . . . since the obscenity debate over Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography.”

Jones argues now that the incorporation of the workshop participants’ actual words and images hardly precludes the possibility of art. “Art has to have an individual voice, a particular, in order to resonate,” he says. “I wanted actual living, breathing people.”

Jones, of course, isn’t alone in his use of the documentary--which has been widely employed in contemporary theater from playwright Emily Mann through solo performer Anna Deavere Smith. “I can go to ‘Nightline’ and hear interviews,” he says, “but I think what I have done is different.”

His peers agree. “The controversy was absurd,” says choreographer Rousseve, who also makes interdisciplinary dance-theater works that typically tackle such issues as racism and homophobia.

“According to (Croce’s) definition, I do victim art as well. But a lot of great art is about oppressed people. What Bill does is speak through the hopeful voice of someone who lives in an oppressed society.”

Still, the conflict has taken a toll on Jones. “For a person like myself who has often said transgression is the lifeblood of art, it made me think,” he says. “This tortuous debate hurts me. Discourse needs passion, but it needs proper information and compassion too.”

The work, says Jones, has “been vindicated” through positive audience and critical response, although some of its resonance may have been lost in the whirl of publicity. “In some ways, the controversy was good for it,” he says. “I hope ‘Still/Here’ can stay around, then maybe be put away and (brought) back. Sometimes, work the first time around can’t be seen so clearly.”

It will surely have a life if people like Robert Cole, director of UC Berkeley’s Cal Performances, have anything to do with it. One of Jones’ most regular venues, Cal Performances presented “Still/Here” in February and had to add a show in its 2,000-seat hall to accommodate the demand for tickets.

“We’ve been presenting Bill for at least 10 years,” says Cole, who has reserved dates for Jones in 1997, for an as-yet-undecided new work. “This work is part of a continuum from his previous works of dance-theater and it certainly shows growth and development, both choreographically and dramatically.”

Cole echoes the sentiments of other presenters when he says that he remains unconcerned about any controversy, now or in the future, or about whether the boost to ticket sales will last. “This discussion will probably fade and we’ll have to go to what he actually does, which is good.”

“I really appreciated that piece and, even more, the dialogue he was trying to develop about sickness and illness,” Rousseve says. “While the work is political, Bill keeps it at a high level artistically.

“ ‘Still/Here’ was one of my personal favorites (of Jones’ works),” Rousseve continues. “The human and artistic growth were inspiring. As a younger artist, I appreciated that he would be so established and yet his work would hit me so powerfully.”

Yet for all the support he has received, there is a lingering annoyance for Jones: that he feels pigeonholed. He says, “You feel like they took a snapshot and tried to define you at one point, when you know there’s been a history before and you’re pretty sure there’s going to be a history following.”

The history before is “still here” for Jones.

Born the 10th of 12 children to fieldworkers who migrated from Florida to Upstate New York, Jones has long felt like an outsider.

“My father decided to become a black Yankee,” he says. “He decided, for whatever reasons, to remove himself from the soil that he and my mother loved and move to the North.”

That spawned a feeling of displacement that Jones has yet to leave behind. “We always felt a bit like refugees,” he says.

Going to school with mostly white kids, he learned quickly to switch between the vernacular spoken at home and the one used at school.

“That set me up for an art form that would allow maximum malleability in terms of identity,” Jones says.

In high school, Jones excelled at track and drama. “I was a runner who left the desire for the sweat of competition for another kind of sweat,” says Jones of his gravitation toward the arts. “It had to be rooted in the body, whatever this (art) form (would be).”

Jones enrolled at the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1970. It was there, in 1971, that the 19-year-old Jones met the then-22-year-old Arnie Zane, a Jewish photographer-dancer from Queens who had recently graduated. It was Zane who encouraged Jones to explore modern dance.

From 1974 to ‘79, Jones and Zane danced with Lois Welk’s Binghamton-based American Dance Asylum. During that period, Jones began to follow the work of the major African American dance companies--Dance Theatre of Harlem, Alvin Ailey--but he found them too conservative. To this day, the dancers he cites as most inspirational are Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown.

Jones and Zane formed Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane & Company in 1982. The troupe has always been an unusual group of dancers, notable not only for its experimental style, but also for the range of physiques and ethnicities represented by its members.

In that way, the company mirrored Jones and Zane. Jones is effortlessly stylish and sensual, with a dancer’s physique and (nowadays) a sleek shaved head. Zane, on the other hand, was short, wore a bleached streak in his long locks and was known for his outrageous clothes.

Jones and Zane were a power couple in the downtown Manhattan art scene of the early and mid-1980s. They were figureheads of a sort, at a time when race and gay politics were just beginning to become chic artistic currency, in the days prior to institutional multiculturalism.

Around this time as well, the performing arts community was nursing a love-hate relationship with the large-scale spectacle theater works of Robert Wilson and others. “A lot of people were influenced by Robert Wilson and his liberal notion of stage space and time,” Jones says. “Then again, there’s been a generation of us trying to say no to that cool austerity.”

Also in these years, people began to start dying from complications of AIDS.

The surge in identity politics as the stuff of performance, the rise of postmodern spectacle theater and the emergence of AIDS all shaped Jones as an artist, and they continue to show in his work today.

Dance, life and the Zeitgeist have been intertwined for Jones. Both he and Zane were tested and found HIV-positive in 1985, the same year that the first major AIDS plays were produced for mainstream audiences.

Zane was ill for three years, during which time Jones cared for him. By the time Zane died in 1988, the pair had been together as lovers and collaborators for 17 years.

Jones has continued the same mission of mixing message and extremely expressive, gestural dance in his work in an often-provocative vein. He’s given to in-your-face acts, including, famously, an episode in which he recently dropped his drawers during a performance--in front of a pair of children at a benefit fund-raiser for potential board members, no less.

It’s all for the art, of course. “A radical act serves the purpose of crystallizing the argument, making the participants more alert and accountable,” says Jones.

And while his penchant for confrontation has often gotten him into hot water, nevertheless Jones also has been continually saluted for his palpable magnetism and versatility.

In recent years, he has choreographed operas and directed theater, in addition to creating dance works. He performs solo infrequently these days, but many critics say he has lost nothing of his power as a performer.

In 1989, he brought his mother onstage at UCLA’s Wadsworth Theatre to perform with him during the annual Black Choreographers Festival and proceeded to ask her about her religious faith and for advice in dealing with his pain in the wake of Zane’s death.

A whittled-down version of that meeting with his mother also appears in his last large-scale work prior to “Still/Here.” “Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land,” a work from 1990, was presented by UCLA in 1991 and a documentary about it aired on PBS’ “Great Performances” in 1992.

That three-hour work covers a range of Jones’ signature subjects, from racial and sexual politics to the church and family. It also enlisted about 40 local men and women to appear naked onstage in a finale with the company dancers.

But as with “Still/Here,” Jones was himself mostly offstage and his presence was missed. The Times’ dance writer Lewis Segal called the piece “a sprawling literary pageant that leaves Jones himself painted into a corner as both performer and creator.”

What lessons this new chapter in Jones’ career holds is unclear. Certainly it has brought the artist face to face, once again, with questions of identity.

He has grown to resent the facile labels that are pinned on him these days. “When (critics) say, ‘He’s HIV-positive’ or ‘He’s got AIDS,’ that’s shorthand for explaining why he does what he does,” Jones says. “To say (someone is) a black artist is easier than to talk about what this person has done.

“It’s a bit offensive,” Jones continues. “It feeds into a sense of alienation, which is the last thing I want.”

Jones would prefer, instead, to skip the naming of names. “I say I’m a card-carrying member of the human race. I have my particular description and I own that, but I’m trying to understand where I go from there.”

One place that he has yet to reach is, in a way, his own back yard. Jones’ audiences are dominated by the white, middle-class people who typically patronize avant-garde events.

That, says Jones, is a barrier that won’t be easy to break down. “I’ve been working at it for 20 years, and I don’t know how to not compromise what I do (and yet) pull people of color into the audience,” he says. “Live theater is a tradition that comes with a certain level of education and comfort, and blacks are new to that.”

It also is a matter of cultural identity. “If you’re a white, middle-class person, you’re not often in the position where you have to think, ‘Is this me or not?’ ” he says. “The whole world seems to be about ‘you.’ Black audiences--and I apologize for generalizing--want to see an affirmation of their experience onstage.”

Nonetheless, Jones’ company will continue to play for whoever is interested and, slowly but surely, will broaden its audience, as has already started in the past year.

Jones continues to choreograph new works for his company, at the same time he moves further in other directions. “I’m committed to my company, but I have a desire to try different projects,” he says. “I have to go where those opportunities are.”

Jones has a base in Lyon as well as in his longtime residence in Nyack, N.Y., where he lives with his partner of the past couple of years, Bjorn Amelan.

For the Lyon Opera Ballet, Jones is working on a piece called “Twenty-Four Frames Per Second” in honor of the 100th anniversary of the invention of cinema by the Lumiere brothers. He will travel with the Opera Ballet company when it comes to the United States in May, for the events in San Francisco marking the 50th anniversary of the United Nations.

Meanwhile, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane & Company--which has had Jones along for nearly all of the early “Still/Here” tour--will continue to bring the work to cities in the United States and Europe.

The company will be losing four members this year and Jones will have to replace them, which won’t be easy. “If I bring a new dancer in, I want to feel that there’s something that they’re wrestling with emotionally, metaphysically, in this world,” Jones says. “That’s what I connect to as an artistic fuel.”

Jones’ need to connect with his dancers harks back to his partnership with Zane, to whom he still refers frequently in conversation.

“The way we started making art was so intimate,” Jones says. “We were friends, we were the same age, interested in similar things and we built these organizations around those relationships.

“Now, here we are 20 years later and I know that I have to be the father, and that changes things,” Jones continues. “I try not to let it be (a barrier).”

In fact, he has a lot of role modeling to do these days. But it seems to come naturally to this man who, at one point in his early life, seemed to others as though he might be suited for the clergy.

“I’m on the firing line, and I have a responsibility,” Jones says. “There are a lot of young people out there watching (to see) how’s he going to handle this, how’s he going to rise above this, and I’m striving to. I’m not an icon, a reduction, a symbol. I’m a man. It’s a real juggling act that I’m involved in right now.”

* “Still/Here,” Wiltern Theatre, 3790 Wilshire Blvd. Thursday-Friday, 8 p.m. (pre-performance talks by Bill T. Jones at 7 p.m.). $22-$30. (310) 825-2102 or (213) 365-3500 (Ticketmaster).

* “Black & Blue: Choreographers Bill T. Jones and David Rousseve,” a panel, UCLA, Dance Building, Theater 200 . Saturday, 10:30 a.m. $10 ; parking in UCLA Lot 4, $5. (310) 825-2101.