Point Made, He Dances On

A week before his engagement at UCLA’s Royce Hall, Bill T. Jones is anxious to talk about new work and pointedly not interested in revisiting his high-profile decision to abide by the NAACP boycott of South Carolina while the Confederate flag flies over the State House there.

“Nothing has changed as far as I understand, and I don’t really want to spend much more time talking about that,” Jones says tersely on the phone from Minneapolis, where his dance company is in residence at the Walker Arts Center for a week.

Jones issued a statement at the end of February, announcing that his company would not appear in May at the Spoleto Arts Festival in Charleston, S.C., if the boycott was still on. He clarifies that his response was not a cancellation; in fact, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company is still on the Spoleto roster and tickets are being sold in hope that the flag will come down.

But if pressure is brought to bear on South Carolina legislators, it won’t be coming from the larger arts community, it seems. A few performers have canceled concerts in the state (Patti LaBelle and the O’Jays are the most visible), but so far Jones is the only artist among hundreds scheduled to perform at Spoleto who has given public support to the cause.

“There are a lot of people involved in the festival, and I think that the press should be calling them daily to ask what they’re doing,” Jones says firmly. “I’ve made my position clear. The questions you should be asking is not ‘Why I’m doing what I’m doing’ but ‘Why are there so few people who feel that they have to boycott? Why do so many people have a rationale that allows them to find other ways of responding to the [Confederate] flag?’ People have a lot of deep responses to the issue, but the biggest response is the silence.”

Spoleto Festival director Nigel Redden has gone on record as sympathizing with Jones’ position but has also voiced an argument familiar in debates about the relationship between art and politics: “The best way for artists to deal with an issue is to speak out, by performing.”

And on most occasions, that’s exactly what Jones has done, from his early solo and company works in the ‘70s and ‘80s, to his evening-length works in the ‘90s. His personal passions and concerns have influenced his choreography, from issues of race, stereotyping and religion in “Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land” (1990) to his incorporation of testimony from the terminally ill in “Still/Here” (1994). Critics noted that a later work, “We Set Out Early . . . Visibility Was Poor,” which came to UCLA’s Royce Hall in spring of 1998, was more abstract, but no less affecting in terms of its evocations of a journey of darkness, discovery and transformation.

This week, Jones is bringing his solo program “The Breathing Show” to Royce Thursday night; his company’s latest work, “You Walk?,” will be performed Friday and Saturday. Moving happily from boycott talk into “what is going to happen,” Jones says that his solo evening, which will be retired after its July Lincoln Center engagement, has been fulfilling for him. At age 48, having concentrated more on choreography than performing in recent years, Jones the dancer has again become the darling of the critics. For the New York Times’ Anna Kisselgoff, seeing Jones alone onstage was “a chance to experience the old spellbinding magic.”

Jones says that his solo foray not only reconfirmed for him the difficulty and rewards of “art-making” but produced several movement phrases he carried into “You Walk?” He describes his process with the familiar, articulate rhetoric he lavishes on each new project, constructing his spoken paragraphs as artfully as he sculpts his body onstage. Although he doesn’t link his thoughts about the Confederate flag controversy to “You Walk?,” the work’s theme--the way different cultures have met, collided and merged--seems to be related.

The work is one of several commissioned by Bologna’s Teatro Arena del Sole about the influence of Mediterranean and Latin cultures on the rest of the world.

“I was asked to do something about its influence on the New World,” Jones says. “My impression was, of course, that it was quite a painful encounter between one set of values and another. How do you suggest the magnitude of small tragedies, epiphanies and belief systems that slid into each other, crashed in--exploded into each other?”

Jones decided not to think in terms of opposing categories such as “colonialism” and “the oppressed,” but to investigate feelings of longing and displacement. On the trail of understanding the encounter between Europe and the Americas, Jones was impressed by Jared Diamond’s book “Guns, Germs and Steel,” which suggests environmental and scientific reasons for conquering anti-colonialism.

Jones also did his own research into what he calls “the collision of cultures” in Bahia, Brazil, where he encountered the “beautiful hybrid” music of contemporary composers writing in the style of Gregorian chant. This music became part of the eclectic score for “You Walk?,” along with an East African song recorded in the ‘50s, a 17th century opera written by a Jesuit as a teaching tool in South America, Portuguese fado singing, Texas prison songs and a Mozart adagio.

“You get the sense of things blending in--the way movements and costumes change, and the same individuals are dancing,” Jones says. “This is how I understand history, that we all have done this--not one evil group against one good group, but we all have gone through various changes and permutations, at each other’s hands and sometimes at the hands of nature and time and circumstance.”

Jones Starting Research for His Next Work

Jones’ vision of a blend-friendly cosmos has been enhanced by a number of visual effects from digital artist Paul Kaiser (who has also worked with Merce Cunningham)--a star field that moves, candle flames that become a wall of fire and a horizontal bar that becomes the horizon, then turns into a cross.

Jones already has started research for his next work, which will again incorporate the ways different people see things. During the company’s Minneapolis residency, he held workshops in which people were asked, “What does God look like?” Their various perceptions will find their way into a piece called “Loud Boy,” inspired by the god Dionysus in Euripides’ “The Bacchae.”

The idea of combining classical references with a contemporary American sensibility is not uncommon for Jones. In fact, the title for “You Walk?” came from Derek Walcott’s “Omeros,” based on Homer’s “Iliad.”

In Walcott’s poem, Jones explains, the character of Achilles is obsessed with the idea of Africa. “One night, he dreams he walks across the floor of the ocean back to his ancestral village, and the next day when someone asks him, ‘Where was your mind last night?’ he says, ‘Africa.’ And this person says, ‘Oh, you walk?’

“I find that poignant, that so many of us carry around the sense of displacement and loneliness. The Portuguese have a term for it--saudade, which actually means ‘longing’ and informs fado.

“So this whole work has been trying to understand the roots of this longing. I’m not an anthropologist, and I try not to be political. Mine is a poetic response to a social political topic. It’s very much a world of the imagination.”

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* “The Breathing Show,” Thursday, 8 p.m., Royce Hall, UCLA. $13-$40. “You Walk?,” 8 p.m., Thursday and Friday, 8 p.m. $13-$45. (310) 825-2101. Jones will be at Border’s in Westwood for a book-signing tonight at 7:30.