Hollow Themes Trip Up Bill T. Jones’ ‘You Walk?’

Two years ago, just before the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company played UCLA, the city of Bologna, Italy, offered Jones a commission to create a work about Mediterranean culture in the New World.

Titled “You Walk?,” that work arrived Friday in Royce Hall looking very much in its best sections like outtakes from “We Set Out Early . . . Visibility Was Poor,” the meditative, masterly full-evening abstraction that the Jones/Zane company was touring when the Italians made their offer. The same use of game structures to develop unusual dances, for example, and the same inventive side-by-side juxtapositions of dancers working in entirely different idioms.

The worst sections of this new, nonlinear, nine-part epic resembled the theme-driven spectacles that made Jones a high-profile choreographer internationally--pieces such as “Still/Here” and “Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land.” The same crude dramaturgy, the same endless passages of generalized, inexpressive motion that roll on while the theme they’re unable to physicalize gets defined through text or music or design elements.

Ricocheting between these extremes, “You Walk?” falls into a trap that can be said to be--with apologies to the Bolognese--pure baloney. For about a third of the evening, Jones stages an ecclesiastical opera, “San Ignacio,” composed by 18th century Jesuit missionaries in the Amazon. And he wants you to see it both as colonial propaganda and what his program note calls “a strong case for the elusive, amoral transcendence that is the particular attribute of great art.”

That’s the trap: contradictory intentions that cancel one another out and leave only a ghastly pall behind. The music is on tape, a translation is in the program and the various saints and demons on the stage are identified by slides--but Jones is utterly unable to make the characters and situation come alive. Not even with a selfless central performance by Miguel Anaya.

You sit there not believing any of it--and remembering that Jones’ postmodern generation began by cleansing American modernism of this kind of hollow pretense. Now, however, Jones piles it on, starting with a sequence in which the corps performs reconstructed medieval dances that relentlessly separate and oppress two reckless hyper-contemporary individualists (Toshiko Oiwa and Germaul Barnes).

But enough. As indicated, Jones has made wrong turns before and found his way back. “You Walk?” may be disastrously uneven, but it boasts sumptuous visual effects achieved by the use of Bjorn Amelan’s transparent scenic panels to both frame and reflect video projections by Paul Kaiser and lighting effects by Robert Wierzel.

The Friday performance suffered from frequent technical glitches, but the expanding nebula in the virtually danceless final scene looked gorgeous. And such moments as the magical duet for Oiwa and Eric Bradley (conceptually in sync and spatially near one another but never relating) ultimately counterbalanced the dogged arm-swinging motifs and other choreographic padding that Jones resorted to all evening as a substitute for inspiration.

Besides the dancers mentioned, the company included Alexandra Beller, Stefanie Batten Bland, Catherine Cabeen, Christian Canciani, Ayo Janeen Jackson and Daniel Russell Kubert.