Brash and bruised

SOME WERE IN TEARS AFTER CLASS.

Kar-on Brown Lehman’s students at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts were about to present their latest dance creations at Pasadena City College as part of the high school’s Student Choreography Showcase 2005. So they’d been honored that, two days before the event, they would have the opportunity to present those creations before guest instructor Bill T. Jones, artistic director of the acclaimed Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company.

But that was before Jones shredded them to pieces.

Even if one is not an anxious high school dance student, there is something about the tall, regal, unsmiling Jones that produces the nagging feeling that one is doing something wrong. What remains unclear -- but, surely, something.

Maybe it’s his perfect posture, ruler straight, better than possible. Maybe it’s the frequency with which he lobs the word “should” at the students: “You know Nijinsky’s ‘Afternoon of a Faun’? You should. Do you know the work of Roy Lichtenstein? You should. Do you know what kitsch is? You should.”

Then there are the “shouldn’ts.”

The kids’ movement choices are too literal: “Don’t give me television. There’s a lot of Hollywood,” he scolds. Or too pretty: “You want to look good always. Ever see a woman with her teeth knocked out?” he demands of a lovely young thing gamely attempting to portray a battered woman. The students are experimenting with contemporary choreography, but “ballet is winning,” he charges.

One ebullient young woman tells him about her work on the technical crew for the coming show. She loves the performing arts, but her career goal is to become a physical therapist, possibly for dancers. As far as Jones is concerned, that ends the conversation.

“I like to talk to artists, to people who are serious,” he snaps. “I don’t come out here with a cold to talk to people who aren’t serious.” In fact, anyone who doesn’t have a clear artistic vision by high school might as well hang up his or her dance shoes. “It has to be a language that you can’t live without,” he says. “Because believe me, the world can live without you.”

Still, Jones manages to soften his blows by throwing himself into the ring with the students.

“Everything I say to you, I say to myself,” he says. “The most intimidating thing you can do is to show your work before another artist -- and a stranger. It is very brave and very important, and I hope you keep that strength with you the rest of your life.”

Later, Lehman recalls that when the class was over and students were making their way to a technical rehearsal, “some were crying. Some were a little upset. But in the end, they discovered that his information had really helped them.” And though it was too late to change their choreography, it wasn’t too late to change their performances. “They internalized what he said, and you saw the difference in all the performances, and it was really very beautiful.”

Decades of controversy

The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, appearing next weekend at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, is celebrating its 20th anniversary. An international tour will include other California stops: UC Riverside, April 10; UC San Diego, April 12; and San Francisco, May 19 to 22.

The 53-year-old Jones has been the company’s sole leader since 1988. That’s when Zane, his companion as well as professional associate, succumbed to AIDS-related lymphoma. Their dance relationship had begun in 1982, and the pair had made the most of their differences onstage: Jones is tall and black, with a dancer’s physique; Zane, who started out as a photographer, was short, white and squat. Their inventive partnering soon made them the critical darlings of the postmodern dance scene.

Some reviewers, though, have dismissed works by Jones for using the same sort of literal approach that he criticized in the young dancers. He’s been alternately praised and vilified for infusing racial and sexual politics into his choreography with such pieces as 1990’s “Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land.” That toured internationally and made headlines because it involved crowds of naked community members at each stop.

Jones’ tendency to take on social injustice has also spilled over into his business decisions. In 2000, he canceled a planned company performance at the Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, S.C., in response to a call from the NAACP to boycott South Carolina’s tourist industry unless the state stopped flying the Confederate flag over its Capitol building in Columbia.

In an interview after the high school class, he at first shrugs when reminded of his critics.

“They may be right. I’m a chest-pounder,” he says. “At times, I do literal gestures. There’s nothing wrong with being literal -- it’s how you use it. Sometimes I set out to be literal because that is what’s needed to go out to average people. And I don’t know how you find the balance.

“I don’t know that I was brought here today to make my work an example of what they should be trying to do,” he adds. “An artist of my description has to be very careful. You for yourself may have made a choice and said no to something, but quite frankly, if you look at most of the taste of the world, they’re right on. Very literal, melodramatic, easily read -- that is the culture.

“But you hope you are talking to a rebellious person who is sensitive, and there are usually not very many. That’s not about snobbism, that’s about the truth. That’s what you hope you are speaking to, even though they are very young.

“There are other choices -- that’s what I was saying to them. You’ve got to work harder, and there’s no one who can tell you when it’s right.”

But a new piece of his serves as a strong reminder that, 10 years ago, one prominent critic dropped a bomb by charging that he was seriously wrong.

The Los Angeles program will include this piece, a reexamination of his controversial 1994 work “Still/Here.” It was an exploration of mortality that grew out of workshops with nondancers facing life-threatening illnesses, including AIDS and cancer. It featured the sick people on videotape along with company dancers onstage performing movements inspired by the workshops.

“Still/Here” received mixed reviews, but the opinion that seemed to eclipse all others came from a critic who famously refused to see it: Arlene Croce of the New Yorker, who accused Jones of being “literal” to a fault. In an essay headlined “Discussing the Undiscussable,” she called the work “victim art.”

“By working dying people into his act, Jones is putting himself beyond the reach of criticism,” Croce wrote. “I think of him as the most extreme case among the distressingly many now representing themselves to the public not as artists but as victims and martyrs.” The videotapes, she went on, were “the prime exhibits of a director-choreographer who has crossed the line between theatre and reality -- who thinks that victimhood in and of itself is sufficient to the creation of an art spectacle.”

The new piece, in which Jones performs, is titled “The Phantom Project: Still/Here Looking On” -- appropriately, because the dance is indeed a phantom that is likely to haunt Jones for the rest of his career.

All you have to do is broach the subject with him to realize that he’s Still/Angry -- less about Croce’s opinion than because the attendant discussion put him on the list of “martyrs” because he is HIV-positive.

“The discourse around its theme and my health stopped me from understanding what I originally loved about dance in the first place,” he says.

His decision to revisit the work can’t help but remind that he is indeed still here when so many are not -- and he doesn’t like it. “It’s ‘Oh, poor guy, he’s still around,’ ” he grumbles. “I’m an upper-middle-class American, I get state-of-the-art healthcare. I’m not living in sub-Saharan Africa, you know? I’m very disciplined, I don’t use drugs, I don’t abuse my body. I’m probably in better shape than I ever was before. I’m a bit offended when people say, ‘You’re still here,’ as though HIV is a death sentence.

“Let’s move on. I don’t want to talk about this part anymore.”

Former Jones/Zane company member Arthur Aviles, now artistic director of Typical Theater and the Bronx Academy of Dance -- a space for “women, people of color and the gay, lesbian and transgender community” -- performed in “Still/Here” in 1994 and hotly defends both the work and Jones’ approach to art. He calls Jones’ attempts to promote diversity a gift to the dance world.

“I am a small, bald Puerto Rican man who’s gay, and before joining Bill’s company I had some issue with that,” Aviles says. “During my years with his dance company, I felt a certain empowerment. He gave me a pride in my ethnicity and sexuality that I never thought I could bring into my dance.

“I thought my dance could be much more neutral. I was brought up by postmodernists, and the performance was kind of devoid of the personality of the dancers. Bill is also very much about form but wants people doing it, people who are alive creating his forms. He is able to give dancers pride in their dancing, and you see it onstage.”

But Aviles adds with a laugh: “I bet -- and here’s the wild thing -- that if Bill were to read some of this, he would contradict me up and down, because Bill is unpredictable in that way. I don’t think he’s a devil’s advocate. He’s just unpredictable.”

A sense of urgency

Aviles is not the only one to note that Jones can be contrary. Village Voice dance editor Elizabeth Zimmer, author of a book on the Jones/Zane partnership, acknowledges his occasional defensiveness. Zimmer is, by the way, not a big fan of “Still/Here”; one of her favorite pieces is Jones’ provocatively titled “Reading, Mercy and the Artificial Nigger,” based on the story “The Artificial Nigger” by Southern writer Flannery O’Connor. Initially offended by O’Connor’s title and subject, Jones decided to reinvent the story of a white grandfather and grandson and their bizarre encounter with a plaster figure of a black boy by using color- and gender-blind casting. The work, performed to a reading of the story, is scheduled to be on the programs in Riverside and San Francisco.

“I did a piece on Bill a couple of years ago for Dance Magazine, and he was really aggressive with me,” Zimmer says. “I wanted to say: ‘I don’t need this. I just want to write this story!’ But I think he feels that he doesn’t have a lot of time. He’s been HIV-positive for several decades.... He just doesn’t have time to waste, he doesn’t have time to mess around. He wants to be taken as seriously as Paul Taylor is taken seriously, as Merce Cunningham is taken seriously.

“I’ve known Bill for almost 30 years. He’s been through a lot. He’s been misinterpreted by the press. You want to call it a chip? Yeah. He has a chip on his shoulder.”

Not a big enough chip, though, to prevent him from risking it all again on “The Phantom Project: Still/Here Looking On.”

“I couldn’t resist it, because I thought I hadn’t gotten it out of my system,” he observes thoughtfully. “But I couldn’t return to it the way it was. There had to be a reason why I was returning, and that reason was it was going to be a kind of bridge that connects the strands of life.

“It is a piece that people remember as if there were no before or after, and that’s not true.”

“After” has actually been pretty good for Jones. These days, he professes to be more interested in spirituality than in politics. He has a new companion, sculptor Bjorn Amelan, who also serves as associate artistic director and set designer for the company. Amelan was formerly the partner of fashion designer Patrick Kelly, who died of complications from AIDS in 1990.

“I think a serious artist is probably at some level driven, with a lot of demons. But I’m in love, I enjoy a good drink, I like children,” Jones says. “I don’t feel like a tragic figure. I’m not.

“Arnie was my collaborator. We formed a company together. This is about the company, and us as artists, and love, all right? It just so happened that it was between two men. The company is a child that he and I had. The company has been around probably longer than Arnie and I were together, and that’s what it should be.

“When we started working together, they said, ‘They’re putting their relationship onstage.’ What I’m trying to get at is what it feels like to make art, no matter what they say or even, in some ways, what you feel. You keep going.”

Do you know Bill T. Jones? You should.

“That’s the resistance you feel in me. I don’t want to be talked to like other people. I am me for a reason,” he asserts. “Arnie Zane and I -- there was no one like us before, and no one like us afterward, right?

“I’m talking about a certain kind of honesty that comes from understanding the world. That’s why I’m still here.”

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Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company

Where: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday

Price: $20 to $50

Contact: (213) 365-3500 or www.ticketmaster.com