Merging, diverging

There are many kinds and degrees of culture shock, with a small but genuine one rattling the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Saturday.

For 20 years the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company has been a fixture of major alternative spaces and the university dance circuit. But Jones’ complex amalgam of hot issues and cool postmodernism is so unlike anything previously seen at our downtown culture palaces, it was brave to make him a part of the Music Center’s second self-produced dance series.

Jones comes at an audience from a number of perspectives: African American, homosexual, Socratic, for starters. Sometimes he’s in your face, sometimes he’s putting himself on the line; he strikes some observers as the resident truth-teller of contemporary dance and others as an incorrigible drama queen.

On Saturday, he began and ended his three-part program (one new work, two remakes of pieces from a decade ago) with sentimental reminiscences -- delivered, typically, with a defensive edge (“Please don’t laugh at me”).

His elegiac texts paid tribute to lost friends, former dancers in the company and people he met in workshops. But the strongest movement that he set to those texts, and the deepest preoccupation of all the choreographies on view, arguably concerned partnerships, couples, matings.

“Mercy 10 x 8 on a Circle,” his newest creation, started and finished with Asli Bulbul and Malcolm Low exploring differences and connections: the theme of the evening. Other duets dominated the other pieces with the tiny but mighty Shaneeka Harrell and Ayo Janeen Jackson the most combustible of the same-sex hookups. Even large-scale passages inevitably broke down into units of two.

Jones often tried to direct our attention elsewhere, but even his deepest confessional moments -- when asking, for instance, whether it was fair for him to represent a living person only by a telltale gesture or something said years ago -- ultimately counted for less than just the sight of him sitting on the sidelines, his arms wrapped around dancer Erick Montes.

Using music by John Cage, “There Were... “ exploited bold contrasts: rapt stillness versus playful gymnastics, formal and even courtly moves versus casual and sometimes pedestrian actions. Statements of intimacy soon predominated: an instinctual happy synchrony for Gaetan Pettigrew and Donald C. Shorter Jr., a kiss for Leah Cox and Wen-Chung Lin, and eventually a cast frieze of loving togetherness.

“Mercy 10 x 8” featured more kissing, a central solo for the powerful Catherine Cabeen, lots of jogging to Beethoven and all sorts of linkups that seemed at once crafty in their relation to the score but intuitive in making all the couples -- and, in particular Bulbul and Low -- studies of how people can move in tandem, keep their individuality yet share their most essential qualities.

If a piece on marriage seemed to be evolving, moment by moment, throughout the program, “The Phantom Project: Still/Here Looking On” kept announcing an emphasis on big issues, cultural and societal. Besides offering a year-by-year summary of the Jones/Zane company history, this 50-minute epic included a precis of “Still/Here,” Jones’ controversial 1994 look at catastrophic illness, set to music by Vernon Reid and Kenneth Frazelle.

The curious mix didn’t bear careful inspection -- especially when Jones’ celebration of his company’s survival seemed nearly equal to beating cancer or AIDS. Moreover, Jones’ enduring anger at all the controversy over “Still/Here” made it a strange choice for a living memorial.

However it certainly proved heartening to learn that such previously overwrought screeds as the sequence “The Eyes” (a recorded interview aggressively reinterpreted in music and dance) had softened over the past decade, growing more humane and honest.

Best of all, “The Phantom Project” contained a startling, magical Jones solo, an internalized gallery of images and personalities that he expressed in movement of fabulous fluidity, gravity and detail. At 53, the things he talks about aren’t always the most profoundly evident features of his choreographies. But when, as in this solo, his body and mind are on the same wavelength, no contemporary soloist reaches further into the heart of dance.