Art Versus Truth in ‘Still / Here’ : Bill T. Jones’ Work Grew Out of a Series of Interviews With Terminally Ill Patients

So now we know at last. We know what caused all that thrashing and gnashing.

Now we understand the intellectual fuss, the heated artistic debates and the passionate philosophical battles. Now we can measure the force behind the hype.

We have seen what Arlene Croce, the distinguished and beleaguered dance critic of the New Yorker, derided as “victim art” in a non-review of a work she hadn’t witnessed. We have seen “Still/Here,” conceived by Bill T. Jones and performed by the extraordinary company he formed with his late partner, Arnie Zane. It opened, courtesy of UCLA, Thursday night for a two-performance run at the Wiltern Theatre.

In case you’ve been off the planet lately, a little briefing may be in order. Zane died of complications of AIDS. Jones, who happens to be HIV-positive, has attempted to use “Still/Here” as an ode to his lover, as an examination of universal loss and as a possible act of therapeutic exorcism.

For all its complexity and despite the tragic context, the concept sounds simplistic. Sometimes the execution looks simplistic, too.

“Still/Here” grew out of a series of taped sessions in which Jones interviewed terminally ill patients in 11 cities around the country. He called the sessions “survival workshops.”

The testimonies of the afflicted are carefully selected and edited. Key phrases are fractured and repeated, sometimes by the patients themselves on video screens, sometimes by the corresponding dancers, sometimes by voices on the recorded soundtrack. (Odetta sings poignant music of Kenneth Frazelle in the first half--the “Still” half--in lyrical conjunction with the Lark Quartet; Vernon Reid provides some nice rocky horrors for guitar in the “Here” half.)

Jones dabbles throughout the full-length piece in picturesque multimedia expression. The screens come and go, offering the faces of the diseased one moment, abstract symbols and anatomical imagery the next. The 10 superb dancers group and regroup, disappear to become silhouettes behind the screens, and execute bold feats of athletic body-poetry--always in presumed response to the gut-wrenching texts.

“Still/Here” can be excruciating to watch--just as footage from Chechnya or Rwanda or Oklahoma City is excruciating. But Jones has not given us a literal documentary of pain and suffering. He merely offers pain and suffering as an easy impulse for choreographic comment and, it is no doubt hoped, for choreographic elucidation.

It doesn’t always work. Not, at any rate, for this viewer.

The genuine horrors are awful. “My illness is not me,” cries one voice. “Tell me how to fight this illness,” implores another, “because I am going to win.” A cancer patient recounts how a nurse’s eyes telegraphed a death sentence. Another is tormented by medical options: “Slash, poison, burn.”

The big faces on the screens demand instant sympathy. In the process, they instantly overpower the merely life-size dancers enlisted to illustrate second-hand agonies.

The reality of death and dying makes the let’s-pretend responses of the ensemble seem trivial, even banal. The dancers may churn in intricate combinations and permutations. They may dash across the stage as if fate could be eluded by speed alone. They may clutch themselves in futile gestures of protection.

They may support and balance each other in beatific poses. They may imitate each other’s moves with fugal determination in mirror patterns.

They certainly do all that is asked with technical brilliance, and with palpable dedication. But whatever they do, their actions seem contrived.

Art, after all, is selective. It requires certain degrees of stylization. It demands a certain distance. It evolves from subjective filtering of details.

Truth isn’t like that. It is clinical. It is brutal. It is objective. It requires no interpretation.

In “Still/Here,” art and truth mingle oddly, uneasily, even clumsily.

It is impossible, of course, not to find the basic subject moving. But it is possible to find Jones’ reaction to that subject both artificial and superficial. Something crucial has been lost in translation.

The choreographer appears in his piece, incidentally, only as a face on a monitor that is pushed around the stage just as the ultimate, climactic frenzy looms. The in-joke represents a rare, wry moment of understatement.

The company is uniformly strong and, in matters of shape and size, marvelously motley. Most memorable, perhaps, are the tall, bald and sensual Odile Reine-Adelaide, the astonishingly febrile Josie Coyoc, the poetic yet passionate Arthur Aviles, the irresistibly fleet and sleek Maya Saffrin and the lithe, stock-handsome Gordon F. White. Most endearing, perhaps, is the unapologetically bulky Lawrence Goldhuber. Ably aided and abetted by Torrin Cummings, Gabi Christa, Rosalynde LeBlanc and Daniel Russell, these paragons try desperately to make the audience focus on the live action, not on the movies. No such luck.

Gretchen Bender is credited with the remarkably flexible “visual concept and media environment.” Liz Prince has designed mood-enhancing costumes: pastels in the first half, crimson in the second. Robert Wierzel paints the stage in melodramatic lights and shadows.

Everyone works diligently to reinforce the wonted catharsis of optimism. “Still/Here” teeters between the real and the unreal, however, offering a phony affirmation of life within a pretty dance of death.