‘Still/Here’ Focuses on Forceful Dance

Exhibit A in the bitter “victim art” controversy of 1994-95, Bill T. Jones’ full-evening dance spectacle “Still/Here,” comes to television tonight in a forceful, one-hour adaptation for the PBS “Alive TV” series.

Incorporating video imagery by Gretchen Bender plus two contrasting styles of music (Act 1 by classicist Kenneth Frazelle, Act 2 by rocker Vernon Reid), the stage original developed its movement ideas, song lyrics and poetic texts from workshops that Jones conducted with people confronting life-threatening diseases.

Directed by Jones and Bender, the “Alive” version completely reconcieves some passages (the ending, for instance) and makes the workshop participants ghostly, blue-green participants in the action rather than faces on video monitors. More than ever, however, the components clash, highlighting the ways in which Jones and his collaborators manipulate and even arguably falsify their sources. Watch, for example, how one low-key but intensely involving interview gets inflated into the angry, grandiose “Her Eyes” aria.

Obviously, the images and voices of people facing death are tremendously moving. The question, however, has always been whether Jones’ dances add anything essential to “Still/Here.” If another choreographer replaced them, would anybody notice?

The TV version makes it impossible to tell, because it usually provides only close-up, fragmentary glimpses of the choreography, concentrating instead on individual dancers. They are fabulous, but before long it becomes clear that you don’t really have to pay attention, that anything remotely important to Jones will hit you over the head again and again. . . .

In 1989, Jones danced an unforgettable solo on the “Alive” series about the loss of his lover and partner, Arnie Zane, to AIDS a year earlier--a solo drawing upon his deepest resources as a dancer, choreographer and witness to suffering. To some of us, everything Jones has done after that on the subject is superfluous. Or worse.

* “Still/Here” airs at 10 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28.