Life Goes On : ‘Still / Here,’ However, Won’t Be, Shortly After Its O.C. Premiere

“Life still goes on no matter how you feel about it, positive or negative, so you better learn how to deal with it.”

That’s choreographer Bill T. Jones on his best-known work, “Still/Here”--a piece that, since its 1994 premiere, has taught him much about dealing with life, including quite a lot about coping with death.

“Still/Here” will be staged in Orange County for the first time tonight at the Irvine Barclay Theatre. It is a two-hour amalgamation of expressive, gestural dance; spoken words; singing; and an original, rock-tinged score by Kenneth Frazelle. It also includes videotaped interviews with terminally ill people--a third of whom now are dead--which caused quite the media controversy.

The uproar began in early ’95 when New Yorker dance critic Arlene Croce refused to see what she termed “victim art.” She couldn’t “review someone I feel sorry for or hopeless about,” she wrote, sparking impassioned responses pro and con. Time magazine dubbed it the biggest “fracas . . . since the obscenity debate over Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography.”

The raw material for “Still/Here” came from “survival workshops” that Jones conducted with people around the country who had life-threatening illnesses. Large onstage monitors transmit their faces and stories while movement translates their words and feelings. We see rage, sorrow, surrender.

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Jones, who is in the company of such dramatists as Anna Deavere Smith (“Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992”) in using documentary style, refused comment about the controversy for months. Finally he spoke about it, insisting that his inclusion of workshop participants’ words and images didn’t place his piece outside the realm of art.

But he did want to breathe reality and specificity into the effort, he said by phone during a recent two-week residency at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in Massachusetts.

“I wanted to ask some very profound questions that I thought might be answered by going out and engaging the world versus [polling] the insular place that the art world can be,” Jones said.

“I’ve always made works that danced on the line between what is life and art. My first solos were [autobiographical] and talked about what happened that day.”

Workshop participants spoke not only about how to cope with illness, he said, “but also how in general to manage one’s life from day to day, to live in the moment, to find meaning in one’s life. They had excelled at it.”

Jones, 44, has been HIV positive for 11 years. He lost his longtime lover, Arnie Zane, to AIDS four years before holding the first survival workshop. His 14-year-old company bears, simply, both their names, and Zane’s choreography remains in its repertory.

“Still/Here,” however, “was never coming just out of [my] torture over Arnie’s death,” he said, “but more out of the question of what this phenomenon of mortality is for us,” particularly in the age of AIDS.

As a result of creating and presenting the work, “I don’t feel so lonely, and I’m not so afraid about my own future and about losing,” he said. “I know about loss and how to deal with curves life throws. . . . A lot of our feelings, once they’re brought out and socialized, are manageable somehow.”

But it’s time to move on, said Jones, who will retire “Still/Here” for a while after its final scheduled performance Oct. 28 in Oregon.

Earlier this year his troupe of five men and five women premiered several well-received works (he danced in most) at New York’s Joyce Theater.

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The new material gives more emphasis to formal considerations, he said, but at least one unfinished piece, “about the desire for an ecstatic experience and its cost” based on Euripides’ play “Bacchae,” bears similarity to “Still/Here.”

“There are metaphysical questions I have about life and an individual’s place in life, about God and nature and man, all of which are dealt with beautifully in this play,” he said.

At one point, dancers recite Euripides’ line “We have to have hope,” echoing a sentiment “that came out very strongly in the survival workshops,” Jones said.

“The participants said you need a sense of highest purpose in your life to survive, a sense of community and the ability to cherish small things. Those were some of things they said were very, very important in dealing with any stressful situation, especially a life-threatening one.

“So the new work asks the question, ‘OK, Bill, if you’re allowed to be alive and in good health and have your dance company, what are you going to do?’ And I’m going to do the thing I love to do, which is make dance.”

* The Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane Dance Company performs “Still/Here” tonight, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive. 8 p.m. $15-$30. (714) 854-4646.