Bill T. Jones Experiments With Fusion of Dance, Text and Image

On stage at UCLA’s Royce Hall, dancer-choreographer Bill T. Jones is dancing the opening solo of “The Breathing Show,” moving from the smallest possible articulations of the neck through limber shoulder and hip rotations, taut balances in extension and finally gestural statements that seem to be in some private code.

Remarkable for its virtuosic isolations of upper, middle and lower torso, this solo will later be deconstructed--re-danced while Jones minutely describes what he’s doing--and then performed again with Jones verbalizing all the thoughts, images and fantasies entering his mind.

This shift from the descriptive to the confessional reflects in miniature the expressive arc of “The Breathing Show,” an 80-minute solo performance supplemented Thursday with films and periodic appearances by designer Bjorn Amelan (bearing water bottles and balloons) and composer-violinist Daniel Roumain.

Early on, Jones dances to Schubert songs, his style built on the union of opposites: a rolling modern-dance torso, sharp balletic step-flurries, colloquial gestures, expansive gymnastics. And somehow the result proves not just strikingly arbitrary or idiosyncratic, but profoundly musical.

The Schubert dances lead Jones to discuss his attachment to European Romanticism and then to speculate on what he might have been dancing in Schubert’s lifetime--the impetus for a segment of songs and dances derived from African American traditions.

The ebullient sense of release in this section soon yields to more problematic material concerning what Jones calls “my desire to defeat time.” Indeed, when he begins intoning studied litanies about making his garden grow and “building paradise”--litanies that inevitably become formal motifs--his texts seem more of a place for him to hide than anything genuinely communicative.

Yes, with their poetic conceits and rounded tones, they define a certain kind of lit-speak that contrasts with his other styles of talk in the same way his different movement styles bounce against one another. But they also raise the cliche quotient of “The Breathing Show” awfully high in a way that his most highfalutin’ balleticisms never do.

Coming from an artist who rejects the instant adoration of his audience with the curt command, “Make me work for it,” and who reveals that his anxiety during the performance just might lead to an “existential breakdown,” such lapses are ultimately outweighed by an array of memorable experiments. Ricocheting from jazz to gestural to robotic to lyrical movement as fast as music and light cues can change, for instance, Jones embodies the whole range of end-of-century American dance, a range he helped expand with his exploration of new modes of thinking about the art.

And even if his pileup of isolated physical effects never connects with the powerful central impetus of a Mozart divertimento, leaving him momentarily high and dry, he recoups with a sublimely airy romp to the Blossom Dearie recording of “I’ll Take Manhattan.”

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His dancing also illuminates the most arresting of the two films on view. In “Ghostcatching,” by Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar, computer-generated motion-capture technology transforms him into a series of disembodied outlines. As these skeletal squiggle-figures move in and out of a cube-like compartment, their smooth, dancerly movement becomes reinforced with comet-tails flowing from their arms and legs--or augmented by sudden shifts into ensemble patterns.

The other film, Abraham Ravett’s “A Garden,” reinforces Jones’ textual imagery with time-lapse footage of rocks and greenery. But they don’t show his garden growing as much as blowing, and they don’t defeat time so much as condense it.

Ornamented with a mobile of silver shards, Amelan’s set creates a kind of stage within the stage--perfect for such an intimate project--and Robert Wierzel’s lighting at one point makes the scenic panels and backdrop look like they’re ancient parchment. The effect isn’t merely striking, but apt, for “The Breathing Show” represents Jones’ creative testament at age 48: an attempt by a major force in postmodernism to summarize all the influences, preoccupations and past work that led him to be dancing at this moment in this memorable way.

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* The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company dances the full-evening ensemble piece “You Walk?” without Jones tonight at 8 p.m. in Royce Hall on the UCLA campus in Westwood. $25-$45. (310) 825-2101.