Dancing in the Face of Horror

For much of his career, dancer-choreographer Bill T. Jones, 49, has been a public symbol of the artist-as-rebel. Best known for controversial full-evening dance spectacles such as “Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land,” on racism, and “Still/Here,” on catastrophic illness, Jones has also been highly visible as an icon of black and homosexual liberation.

With his dance and life partner, Arnie Zane, Jones formed the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company in 1982. Postmodern in choreographic style, Jones and Zane nevertheless tackled social issues in their collaborations, and, indeed, the image they created together on and off the stage--the tall, black, sensual Jones and the short, white, nervy Zane--spoke eloquently of the new freedoms embraced by their generation. Zane died from AIDS complications in 1988, but Jones’ company continues to bear his name.

The trauma of Zane’s passing inspired Jones to an almost defiant risk-taking in the works that followed, works that used dance as one component in complex theatrical explorations of social, sexual and religious taboos. He has also choreographed a number of luminous, pure dance abstractions.

I talked to Jones by phone one week after terrorists used hijacked airplanes to destroy targets in New York City and Arlington, Va.

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Bill T. Jones: I’ve always been interested in how the inside and the outside affect each other, but I’m not really what you’d call a topical choreographer. I’ve just responded to things that have hit me between the eyes.

Lewis Segal: Well, then, talk to me about what hit all of us between the eyes on Sept. 11 and whether you believe that dance can make a difference.

Jones: I’ve spent all afternoon working through the late Beethoven quartets, and I do feel in that new work I need to talk about how I feel about war. And I don’t know how to do that. I’m not interested really in making a political piece about war--particularly with Beethoven--but I am trying to find something that has humanism to it. I’m wrestling with that.

I’m also trying to understand what urgency is and where I can show urgency. Is it in the dance I make or who I vote for or how I speak to the press or how I conduct myself in front of children? How do I show what really matters to me? And I’m trying to acknowledge that my feelings don’t necessarily change anything.

This is back to the question about what art does, and I feel that’s something that’s almost sinful to try to talk about but I definitely tried to talk about in the last work that you saw [“You Walk?,” performed at UCLA last year, about the social ills the Old World visited on the New World].

I was trying to talk about rebellion and history and what I don’t understand about history and how I need to step back and paint a picture that I’m not in the middle of--that my guts aren’t in the middle of.

Segal: Talk to me about how the working process has changed since Sept. 11.

Jones: I had my first session with my dancers today. I got calls from them all last week while I was sort of marooned here [at home in Rockland County, about 20 miles up the Hudson River from New York City]. I couldn’t get to performances in Switzerland and I couldn’t get into the city. My dancers needed to talk to me, just to hear.

So we were back in the room today. We worked very hard, there was a seriousness in the room, there was also a sigh of relief to be back with business as usual.

I entered a circle with my dancers, I sang one of my mother’s spirituals when I pulled them together. I was trying to give them the signal that something important has happened and here in this company is where we can process all that stuff and use it. I said to them that all the truth we need right now is in our work, in our muscles. That’s where our rebellion is.

Then we spent the rest of the time trying to deal with the knotty, difficult counterpoint and rhythms of Beethoven. But I told them I was looking for a central image, something that will give the audience a clue to a world [where] something has happened.

I’m not in a chest-pounding mood, I’m in a more Buddhistic mood and accepting a lot. [What happened] is a horrible thing, but horror seems to be part of the brood that we feed with mother’s milk in this world. And I don’t know if we need any pieces about explosions or terrorism. Terrorism is a new thing for us in this country, and how do I make a piece about new fear? How do I make a piece about my feelings when someone I love gets on a plane? That sinister sinking feeling?

I wish I could be a little bit more dramatic or quotable about that. I’d like to say to you that tomorrow I’m going into the studio to make a work to talk about how this whole country is feeling right now and how I’m feeling. But I’ve never worked that way and I really wish I could. I wish I could make a work that is formal, community-oriented enough and buoyant enough to survive this tragedy and go on to become a company staple.

And that’s what drives me crazy: How do I do that? I just have to keep thinking and trying.

Segal: What about the possibility that you may have made this work already. I’m thinking about the television piece in which, after Arnie Zane died, film of him dancing was combined with images of you dancing, to create a duet.

Jones: “Untitled.”

Segal: Yes, and how I remembered that piece when I thought about the people in the towers who will never be found. I also thought about the terror portrayed in “Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” about an enemy out to kill you....

Jones: Yes, the dogs.

Segal: I teach dance history at USC and show a clip of the dogs to my students. The “Dutchman” sequence [in the same work] is like being on one of those doomed planes, isn’t it? The experience of being trapped in a moving conveyance and someone on it is trying to kill you. You’ve already touched on a lot of the specifics that would belong in a dance about the aftermath of terrorism.

Jones: Maybe you’re right. But the question in the work that I’m making now is what is there that I’m in touch with that can do that? I would never say I’ve become more cerebral, but now I have to understand the bigger picture.

One thing I’ve been proud of is that I have this chestful of feelings that I have opened up and shared, sometimes at moments that were appropriate, sometimes not. But right now it’s the chest of a man who is [nearly] 50, who has been promiscuous with his feelings. And I am now working with [dancers,] any one of whom could be my children. So now I am a bit separate from them. And drawing them together today in that circle and saying, “We’re lucky, things could be a lot different. One of us could not be here,” is about as far as I go right now [into] the nonaesthetic. It was a spiritual gesture, an emotional and psychological gesture, but will it find its way into the work? I don’t know.

The work is in another drawer right now. Whatever happens, I will do what I have been doing since I became an adult. I started dance when I was 19 and I have been trying to follow the vision of art as vital and as meaningful as prayer and as sex, if you will. It is something that has been part of my life and something that is a rebellion in and of itself. *