Moved to Seek a Connection

Dancer-choreographer Bill T. Jones has been interrogating the Big Themes in provocative ways for more than 25 years, most visibly with the Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane Dance Company since 1982. Religion, love, sex, racism, death--no issue has been too hot or too complex to dance about. Influenced most by classical form, modern dance and idiosyncratic improvisation, Jones has often used autobiography and storytelling in his work, especially his two ambitious evening-length pieces: “Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin / The Promised Land” in 1990 and “Still / Here” in 1994.

Jones’ newest work, “We Set Out Early . . . Visibility Was Poor,” premiered at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., last October, with critics noting its lack of explicitly stated themes and its suggestion of a transformational journey. Called “startling in its purity of vision and movement” by one critic, it will be performed at Royce Hall on Friday and Saturday.

Question: I read that Janet Reno stayed for the post-performance talk after “We Set Out Early” at the Kennedy Center. Did you find out what she thought?

Answer: She came backstage afterward, and she was very taken with the piece and particularly with the performers. She wanted to make sure she spoke to each one individually. I think a great many people wanted to stay behind for the talk because they had questions, but they also wanted to hear what other people were thinking, not just what I had to say.

When I talk about a work, I won’t tell you what I was meaning, per se, but I’ll tell you what I was doing and maybe what I was feeling. And then I think you do the other part.

There’s a sort of communion--which is a touchy word that implies something metaphysical and religious, but that’s the way I feel about art. All of those people sat there . . . and watched these other people onstage, and afterward, I think they wanted to extend their communion with the event.

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Q: The title--”We Set Out Early . . . Visibility Was Poor”--sounds like it’s from a 19th century traveler’s diary.

A: Yes, intentionally so. I thought it read like Melville, or a travel book, very open-ended. It has a kind of epic sweep. It speaks of a “we,” not specifying who the “we” is, and it speaks of something that begins somewhere, we don’t know where. It seemed an honest way to describe how I was feeling--something in my nature is always pondering the notion of the “we.”

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Q: How do you do that with dance? After using spoken narration and multimedia effects in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “Still / Here,” you seem to rely more on the moving body in this work.

A: Well, I came into dance when minimalism was raging, and as much as I loved it formally, it could not express my dislocation, my conflicted relationship to the status quo. So I brought into it what I knew--storytelling, songs, references to what I thought was the real world. I wanted to say, “Look, this is who I am.”

Then once I had done that, I knew what could and could not be achieved in terms of that kind of communication. Some things will never be healed between people.

And I learned from people in survival workshops [in preparation for “Still / Here”] who said, “Well, if you’re confused about your life, you don’t know how you’re going to live--isolate what you love. What is your passion? Give yourself to it.” I looked around and, lo and behold, I was so glad to find out that I really loved dancing, as a primary art form. OK, I would give myself to that. Don’t talk about things, because we can dance, we can see who you are, your race, your sexuality, what you’re afraid of. We can almost see what you’re thinking.

Before, with all those public confessional pieces that were painful and emotional, I was trying to say, “Can you see me?” Now, I truly believe I can be seen.

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Q: What was your process like this time?

A: Well, I started with the music, Igor Stravinsky’s “Soldier’s Tale,” John Cage piano pieces and Peteris Vasks’ “Stimmen”--but how to enter into it in terms of movement? I decided to get back into the studio and into my own body, and I’ve been doing a lot of experimentation with skeletal movement, with rhythmical and textural isolations. I tried to apply some of those ideas and just plain old-fashioned, feel-good dancing to the Stravinsky score. On a hot summer afternoon, I danced to it several times and videotaped it and looked at what I had. I saw that man dancing and I said, “This dancer is speaking about everything I could possibly say with text or narrative.” So I said, “Let’s just trust in movement.”

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Q: And how did you do that?

A: Well, for one thing, I’ve been working with my brilliant rehearsal director Janet Wong, who has helped codify my movement. She can learn every idiosyncratic isolation that I do, and set all of my improvisations. We sit with tapes and decide which sections work, and she goes off and learns them, then teaches them to me and to the company. It creates quite a rich, eclectic vocabulary. She has revolutionized the way I make movement and the way that it comes into the company.

I’m very proud of the way it works. It used to dismay me not to have a codified vocabulary, like Balanchine had and Martha Graham had. There’s power and expediency in that. When you start out as I did, literally making it up, suddenly you’re trying to find a shared language.

What is our common language? I’m trying to discover that with this process.

I start out alone, approaching the music purely as rhythm and texture. I work with Janet, then the company comes into it, and I respond to their personalities and shapes. . . . I choose and edit, but I also listen and see what people naturally give back. All of this feeds into a stew--it becomes what “we” are--there’s the “we” word again. I always strive to believe in the “we,” not the “they,” “us,” “I” or “you.” And that’s a hard one in the 20th century, I think, because so much has been balkanized and atomized and deconstructed.

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Q: Are explanations important to you? Is there something you want the audience to know before seeing the work?

A: That’s difficult to say, because I don’t know who they are. I’m inviting them to come and share with me something I find beautiful. And that act of witnessing, looking, contemplation is an act of communion that closes a gap between us. I know it does it for me when I look at art, art that’s centuries old. I suddenly forget the difference; time is irrelevant. Then I’m in touch with an impulse--spiritual, intellectual, what have you. Which is really all we have. I think art is there to keep us agile--not that we agree with it, not that it’s always understood, but we have to keep moving to deal with it.

* Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane Dance Company, “We Set Out Early . . . Visibility Was Poor,” 8 p.m., Friday and Saturday, Royce Hall, UCLA, $16-$40, (310) 825-2101.