Harlem Crawl

“Hey Black Man!” composer/musician Craig Harris said to me last night giving me a firm handshake in the first moments of what was to be a five hour exploratory/research/investigation tour of the Harlem scene.

I had invited Craig, who will be one of the participants in our next Breaking Ground encounter, (Harlem Stage – The Gatehouse February 26, 7:30 p.m.), to be my guide in a “crawl” through the Harlem community in search of “The Scene.” In describing what I was looking for, in conversations with Harlem historian Michael Henry Adams and author Sharifa Rhodes-Pitt (both to participate in Breaking Ground as well), we had grappled with the use of the terms “legend” or “mirage” as a means of describing the phenomena.

Craig and I started at West-African restaurant Kine on West 116 Street and Frederic Douglas Boulevard, a neighborhood that – according to Craig – was until not so long ago thick with heroin users and dealers. It has now been stabilized by a steady influx of entrepreneurial Senegalese who are succeeding in generating a culture of restaurants and bars with a success that still elude the much higher profile 125th Street. Having finished our plate of grilled fish, salad and sweet fried plantain "aloko" in mustard sauce, we jumped into my car and set out on what was an informative though vaguely frustrating journey thru architectural landmarks – some no more than a memory of bygone times – others all too indicative of the real estate gold mine that Harlem is now, with pit stops at several nightspots.

The first of these was Mobay Restaurant on 125th where we both nursed non-alcoholic beers while listening to the nonstop commentary of a self described Harlemite whose sometimes near surreal jumble of facts, fantasy, politics and philosophy was a formidable challenge to the belting of a blues singer accompanied by guitar and drum. Craig, the diplomat, asked (for my benefit) our raconteur, Paul, what he thought had happened to the community over the previous decades. Paul, whose rubbery face distantly resembles Duke Ellington, succeeded in polishing off his plate of barbequed ribs while reporting that “it was when the most powerful country in the world got its ass kicked by little biddy Vietnam, it had to take its frustration out on somebody and so the first target was the Black Panthers, liberal white kids and anybody who questioned the status-quo!” In all fairness to Paul, he prefaced his answer to Craig’s question by saying that “this is my philosophy I am about to give you, nobody else’s!” One way this bullying was achieved, instructed Paul, was thru a concerted effort by the powers-that-be to introduce heroin and, later, crack cocaine, into the Harlem community and just now Harlem is staggering back to its feet.

We headed back to my car and Craig pointed out what he takes to be an example of what has happened to “the scene:” We were standing in front of one of the many 125th Street storefronts that had undergone a renovation in the70’s with a “For Sale” sign prominently displayed. This had till recently (December 2007!) been the celebrated Wimp’s “home of the best southern style sweet potato pie in Manhattan.” According to Craig, when the rent jumped from a few thousand to fifteen thousand dollars per month and the decommissioned Con Ed building across the street sold for millions, ostensibly making way for luxury high rise condominiums, the owner decided to give it up.

“Let’s move” said Craig as we circled through the odd stillness of Harlem’s streets, past the Langston Hughes house, making our way back down to the Mount Morris neighborhood where he pointed out to me “heaven and hell.” On one end of this block stands an impressively renovated apartment building of red brick, a row of stately brownstones and a twenties era apartment building making a sort of portrait of Harlem in architecture. The many senior citizens of the red brick building had “gotten their act together” and taken advantage of government funds that made it possible to buy their units, some as low as $250 for 8 rooms (!), at some point in the past and created a tenants’ association that through self-education, foresight and true community spirit had made it a model of what the “new Harlem” could stand for. According to Craig, several of these folks had been through several eras of Harlem’s history, reaching back to the Harlem Renaissance itself, Second World War, race-riots, the ravages of drugs and were now proudly the owners and masters of their own architectural destiny and identity. This was heaven! By contrast, down the block is a building of similar size full of many people, destitute, disorganized, oftentimes angry and constantly running the risk of “somebody burning them out” so the building would go derelict and bought to be turned into one of the ubiquitous high-priced condominiums. This study, in contrast, was taking place on the periphery of a landmark park that claims the like of Dr. Maya Angelou and other prominent African-Americans.

“Lets move” Craig said again and we took a wide swing through Spanish Harlem with its impressive number of lively late night eating spots and bars. Craig pointed out that this had been traditionally (whose tradition?) an Italian community that is now home to many recent immigrants, in particular Mexicans. We cruised through “Strivers Row,” and further north still to what was once called “Sugar Hill” because that was were all the most beautiful, the most sweet people of the Harlem Renaissance were said to have lived, past the storied elegance of the building where Paul Robeson, Duke Ellington among others had lived. We ended up at the Saint Nicholas Pub catching the last set of the evening in full swing. The Japanese woman who served us cokes was humming to herself, taking periodic breaks to bop solo or with clients to the strains emanating from an ever changing collection of jazz players: a dreadlocked woman on violin, a generous bodied smiling goddess in tights singing “Misty”, men well into their 70’s playing congas, several twenty-somethings playing stand up bass or drum kit and many others.

Craig remarked that while he has been playing in this style since he was thirteen, his own artistic aspirations have changed. Harlem at last is poised to accept a generation of like-minded improvisers who might find what was happening here touching, but perhaps problematic in its nostalgia. At this time, however, some of the most adventurous musical exploration in Harlem happens in private homes according to Craig.

Amid Saint Nicholas Pub’s freewheeling ecumenicalism there was a steady stream of persons tapping me on the shoulder, trying to sell me crudely drawn ball pen renditions of the players, CD’s and even clothing! Seldom have I been in a more democratic environment.

It was about 4 a.m. at this point and I was beginning to wonder if I could match Craig’s stamina and concentration when he suggested we swing by “The Shrine” on Adam Clayton Powell at 134th Street.

The Shrine is run by Nigerians and takes its name from Lagos’s infamous “Shrine” that was the invention and performance space, political platform and nightclub of Fela Anikulapo Kuti, the inventor of Afrobeat from the 70’s until his death in 1994. Shortly after we walked into the place, past the dreadlocked and bearded young men at the door, last call was sounded. As we were not drinking, I had the opportunity to watch the thinning crowd do so against the strains of world music, primarily African, in this room its walls covered with posters of Bob Marley, political leaders and, of course, the great man himself, Fela. Craig introduced me to a young woman who he later described as the youngest child of ten of a man who had been one of Marcus Garvey’s most important collaborators.
- “They (the Nigerians) don’t really want us (the African Americans) here. We need to get our own place!” she whispered to Craig.

I can’t say I felt either discrimination or coldness in a room where everyone seemed busy flirting, gulping down the last drink of the evening and generally enjoying themselves. As we walked back to my car, Craig said this attitude she’d expressed was troubling to him and that there were many divisions such as these, often unacknowledged in the Harlem community. He said other things as well: that the generation gap was real, that there were many clubs frequented by “young dudes” who were unpredictable and often armed. He said, when I asked him about crime, that yes, there was crime, but that it was not the way it used to be when the community was plagued by the crack epidemic, although the dealers were ubiquitous and he could easily point them out, though for some reason the police did not seem able to do so. As an aside, he added that Harlem is in some ways sleeping in the face of issues such as gender and race. It was a strange comment, I thought, as race in particular seems to be the one topic defining the discourse in Harlem, but according to Craig, there are a lot of people with opinions, but no real information.

I drove my guide back to his place on Mount Morris Park, we sat briefly outside looking up to the warmly lit room where he observed that his wife, Dianne, was probably up watching TV waiting for him.
- “Bill, man, you’ll be alright, but you can’t go looking for Harlem in the clubs and restaurants. You just got to get out there in the streets, go into the shops and meet people. People ask me where I get my ideas for my music. Just sitting for a couple of hours in the summertime across the street in the park there is more information than I can handle,” he said.

We said goodnight.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year!

It is raining outside Woodbox, our little retreat on the mesa of Northern New Mexico. The past two weeks have been blissfully quiet – a fitting respite after this intense though rewarding year.

I realize it has been two months since I last wrote and, what a two months these have been. This period saw the final performances of Another Evening: I Bow Down (in Providence, RI) and Blind Date, the major company works we have toured extensively for the past two years and, within a period of ten days, the premiere of two ambitious new creations, one an evening length solo – Walking the Line - at the Louvre Museum in Paris and the other an evening length company work - A Quarreling Pair - at Montclair State University’s Kasser Theater in NJ! We also created a proscenium version of Chapel/Chapter, which will see its first performance in a couple of weeks…

Allow me to share some impressions:

Walking the Line:
Painter Anselm Kiefer was invited by the Louvre to curate a series of events during the month of November as part of an initiative of the museum that saw Toni Morrison curating in 2006. He approached me to create a solo. His original suggestion was for the performance to occur under the Louvre’s Pyramide, but when we visited the site in December 2006, we realized that it was not appropriate. Wandering thru the museum in search of an alternative we reached the magnificent 450’ long sculpture galleries that run from Michelangelo’s Slave to the grand staircase upon which the Winged Victory of Samothrace is placed. It was an irresistible perspective… I decided that my collaborators would be Tibetan singer, Yungchen Lhamo, and the French contemporary music virtuoso percussionist, Florent Jodelet. Bjorn had suggested a red dance-carpet to run the length of the gallery culminating in a red “stage” on the first landing of the Winged Victory’s staircase upon which the audience was to be seated. This inspired the title, Walking the Line.

When we arrived in Paris 10 days prior to the premiere, I had selected a series of musical options based on which I had prepared movement phrases, but nothing was set. We rehearsed every afternoon in a studio and most evenings (after the museum had closed to the public) in the gallery. Yungchen Lhamo said, “This is our temple” and indeed the space with its chilly beauty moved us thru alternating paths of introspection and expansiveness.
Paris was reeling under a public transportation strike, which turned into a general strike. Bjorn and I zipped around the clogged town on a rented scooter (a no no for a dancer – but such a pleasure, particularly as the weather was exceptionally nice for the season!). The staff of the Louvre made every effort to accommodate our needs overcoming great practical difficulties: Robert Wierzel’s exquisite lighting – not an easy challenge in these grand spaces where plugging anything beyond a vacuum cleaner causes the fuses to blow, Bjorn’s red carpet as well as Florent Jodelet’s complicated instrumental set-up, all had to be dismantled after every rehearsal and re-built before the following day’s session as these could not interfere with the public visiting the museum during its opening hours.
Yungchen Lhamo’s aura of calm and the beauty of her voice echoing in the space, Florent’s percussion’s relentless drive booming Xenakis’s Rebond, Dufour’s Plus Oultre A & B and several pieces by Claude Vivier for an array of exotic percussion,Stage Manager, Kyle Maude’s calm coordination of all elements, Janet Wong, insightful and ever efficient all made for a truly singular experience.

The three sold-out performances were extremely well received even by the curators who had shown initial skepticism and apprehension at seeing the priceless still artworks in their custody exposed to our kinetic media. It was a great joy to see the turnout of board members, my sister Rhodessa who flew in from San Francisco, friends from the US, Berlin and Paris, our Executive Director, Jean Davidson. Seldom has any performer had the privilege of using a gallery such as that claiming Leonardo DaVinci’s Mona Lisa as a “green room” before a performance. Thanksgiving lunch at L’Escargot Montorgueil with my sister, Bjorn, Jean and friends before heading the Louvre to perform marked thankfulness indeed as did the lovely dinner Anselm and Renata Kiefer hosted in the extraordinary underground maze of studios Bill Katz designed for him under their building in the Marais.

We flew back home on Sunday. Rarely have I felt so well in Paris! Yet there was no time to process or switchgear since Monday morning we began the technical rehearsals for A Quarreling Pair which was scheduled to open that Friday.

A Quarreling Pair:
Bjorn Amelan’s design and Robert Wierzel’s lighting once again created magic and a fitting frame for the brilliant, original sound-score by Chris Lancaster, Wynne Bennett and vocalist/songwriter George Lewis. The dancers rose to every challenge of this vaudeville show/puppet play/rumination on couple hood and its opposite. This year’s discovery and joy for me was the journey we took with newcomer, actress Tracy Ann Johnson, in one of several incarnations of the sisters Harriett and Rhoda. It is with trepidation that, thru repetition, deconstruction and outlandish juxtapositions, I took Jane Bowles’s original play set over the course of one day and extended it or, as Programming Director, David Archuletta, said “flipped the script”. It worked well enough, although the work still has room to grow…

And this rainy day on the mesa, where all career and ambition seem at a safe remove, asks the question what of 2008?
The closest I want to get to a New Year’s resolution is this: I hope to continue living and doing with all my might, yet reserving some place for reflection and – as ever – trying to close the gap between the inner-life and this big and troubling world…
Happy New Year!

2007 was a very good year!

What defines a good year? The criterion falls into various categories. I am here concerned with our organization’s good health and future as well as my own circumstances as creator.

A good year means:
• The company’s works were shown in an array of venues. A few that come to mind: Blind Date in Milan, Los Angeles’ Royce Hall, Taipei’s National Arts Center, finally closing in Iowa City’s Hansher Auditorium.
Chapel/Chapter did its first out-of-NYC series of performances at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center before an intense week at NYU’s Skirball Theater reconfiguring it for touring in 2008. Soprano Alicia Hall, very pregnant, gave wonderful performances as she said goodbye to Chapel/Chapter for a while and hello to motherhood.
Another Evening: I Bow Down continued to deepen at each new venue in Italy, France, Albany’s Egg, Celebrate Brooklyn in Prospect Park before closing in Providence, RI. Each engagement drew us deeper into the material and closer to our collaborators, Andrea Smith, DBR, Wynne Bennett and Regain the Heart Condemned.
Jedediah Wheeler and his staff made us more than welcome in a multi-faceted, semester long residency at Montclair University. Not only did Blind Date return to the site of its September 2005 premier, but As I was Saying, an evening showcasing my own dance supported by Leah Cox and Donald Shorter, Andrea Smith, violinist Nurit Pacht and cellist Chris Lancaster also received a warm welcome. And as if that with the classes, lectures, etc., were not enough, we were able to build A Quarreling Pair over several residency periods at the Kasser Theater and premiere it there as well.
• The company’s teaching program continues to expand as well. We had a successful winter repertory workshop in NYC and conducted a summer workshop in our third residency at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs. Our 3 months long teaching primary school students on Randall's Island culminated in a very moving “graduation” ceremony complete with showing of the students’ work and medals.
• 2007 was a banner year for me personally. My Tony Award for Best Choreography was one of 8 Tony Awards garnered by Spring Awakening. I was inducted into the National Museum of Dance Hall of Fame in Saratoga Springs and was also recipient of the USA Eileen Harris Norton Fellowship. I was also chosen as one of OUT Magazine's top individuals who had made a difference in 2007.
And another high point: Painter Anselm Kiefer and the Louvre in Paris invited me to conceive a site specific work, Walking The Line (NY Times), in the 450’ stretch of galleries that connect Michelangelo’s Slave with the distant majesty of the Winged Victory of Samothrace. Seldom has any performer had the privilege of using a gallery such as that claiming Leonardo DaVinci’s Mona Lisa as a “green room” before a performance.

Passage of Time

Perhaps the beginning of wisdom is to realize the futility of commenting on the weather!

From the vantage of our garden here in Valley Cottage, this is a very slow fall. Yesterday, in the high wind and rain of Interstate 95 heading to Providence, RI, one could say the splendid autumn foliage, just past its peak, was suffering the ravages of full-blown autumn.

This commentary about the weather has its parallel in observations about the passage of time. My frame of mind is shaped by an autumnal sense of time and the realization that Another Evening: I Bow Down is now finished and our performance at Hancher Auditorium in Iowa City this week will mark the last for Blind Date as well.

Another Evening: I Bow Down had a wonderful send off with a well-attended and passionately engaged audience at Providence’s Memorial Hall, a building in its solemn period rectitude and civic purpose that speaks loud to the passage of time. This final reunion with the members of Regain the Heart Condemned and Daniel Bernard Roumain (whose last planned performance with us will be on Wednesday) resulted in a first rate show followed by David N. Cicilline, the Mayor of Providence, presenting me onstage with the key of the city followed by a lively question and answer with the audience.

The company has flown ahead to Iowa City in preparation for Wednesday’s final performance of Blind Date at Hancher Auditorium, a theater facility that looms large among the important stages around the country and the world that have presented and supported my work since Arnie and I were a duet company in the early 1980’s. Following that performance, board member Zoe Eskin, will host a dinner/get together at the home of Mark Moen and Bobby Jett, in which the three departing company members, Wen-Chung Lin, Shaneeka Harrell and Donald Shorter, will be acknowledged. Such events are always bittersweet for me as they force the recognition of some basic truths. The first being that this company and, indeed, the entire organization is an informal federation of individuals who come in, make a contribution and, in most cases, move on. Secondly, I am reminded that this art form, like this federation, is fragile and ephemeral, dependant on human agreement and subtle affinities in a matrix of time and circumstance that constantly shift in surprising ways.

It is my hope however that with the new maturity Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company is cultivating in its staff, board of trustees and in the art we make the investment made in each departing dancer will not be lost, but can be counted on to further build the company’s teaching program, the dissemination of its ideas and repertoire and an overall strengthening of the community of like-minded individuals that we would like to speak to and for.

I wish I had at this moment a breezy tagline to all this too heavy rumination on a chilly fall morning here at home, but I don’t. I must make my peace with what we do and how we’re able to do it, the known and the unknown in the future and that ever-present gnawing hunger in the belly of this, our enterprise.

Late September

Late September, Monday morning finds me awaking in the expected stillness of my house and garden with Beatle songs running thru my head. I attribute this to the power of Julie Taymor's Across the Universe that we saw yesterday. The 60's will never leave some of us, those of us who lived it or came shortly after in its troubling wake, the 70's. This residue seems to be the one glue that holds together all of my various projects right now. Let's call it "the values of the 1960's" and that curious concept, "the counter-culture."

Blind Date recently performed in Taipei is its own cluster of impressions and sensations, but some events push past the others. Perhaps it was the encounter with the public in one of Taipei's largest bookstores on a Saturday afternoon before our third performance. A young woman in the audience asked what defined my career. I told her it was a kind of echo I felt going thru life shouting about ideas such as identity, art and history, the inner-self informing outer actions, struggle, search for transcendence... My words and actions come back at me, oftentimes distorted, strange, and so it is with each new work that I make, so it is with Blind Date and now Quarreling Pair and even the Fela project. This shouting that I do is informed by the 60's, a time when it was never more clear that we American prize invention, or re-invention of self, be it as a Black Panther, as Weatherman or as "back to the earth child of love". I told the congregation at the bookstore that the company was a community, a microcosm of the world that I want to live in where disparate persons came together to place their efforts and their struggle at the service of some higher goal.

This is the language of the 1960's and I suppose that The Quarreling Pair is its latest variation. As we return to it this morning, my preoccupation is how to make the vaudeville conceit that defines the first half of this dance-work allow us to arrive at the scene we call Ms. Rhoda, Her Final Act, Out in the Street Saving the World. In this scene, our actress, Tracy Johnson, moves in one simple line from stage-left to stage-right as the dancers move every which way past her, sometimes stopping to sing a song by our composer, bandleader, Chris Lancaster, in a manner that could be a crowd's at a protest gathering or it could be an anthem to some new belief-system. At this moment, the stage is bathed in the swirl of world events that make up the near-psychedelic film projection by Janet Wong. In this section, Rhoda intones Bob Dylan's Hard Rain's Gonna Fall that speaks of a young blue-eyed wanderer reporting to someone who loves him all of the things he has seen, heard or will do in this wide, wicked world. Later, Rhoda's sister Harriet, also played by Tracy, who has stayed at home, is speaking to ghosts. She has the last word, however. It's wistful and haunting as she moves in the opposite direction and George Lewis, our brilliant vocalist, song-writer sings for a last time
"I dream I climbed upon a cliff,
My sister's hand in mine..."
In this conclusion to our company's latest evening-length work, there is no resolution to a question I have had for all of my adult life about what is worth doing. In A Quarreling Pair, I've chosen the most theatrical and accessible means to talk about the inner world and the exterior world and the impulse to change oneself and all of that just beyond one's reach. We shall see what happens on the stage at Montclair's Kasser Theater at the end of November.

The performances of Blind Date in Taipei put to the test the identity of this company as an international company, full of "world citizens". The work was premiered two years ago at the Kasser Theater in a time when I/we were trying to understand how our work as a dance company could intersect somehow with the larger debate about identity, conscience and action. Most satisfying for me in these four performances in Taipei's National Theater (conceived to look like a giant's take on traditional Chinese architecture) was Wen-Chung Lin's solo called Wen-Chung and Yueh-Fei the Poet Warrior. At last, my simple assignment to him to speak about what made him Taiwanese was performed for an audience that could hear it as no other can. As he took his bow every night, there was a vocal chorus of approval from the audience. I was never sure if this was simply his well-wishers and friends, or did he really speak for some constituency that wanted him and us to hear them in an especially passionate way. One of the ironies of this engagement for me was that I never could be sure of what the audience was understanding because of language and the gulf that exists between what we do and how we do it and the contemporary Taiwanese. Still, I was left with the feeling and it was confirmed by the director of the theater, that this was the right piece for Taipei.

Another pleasure of Taipei was spending time with Mr. Lin Hwai-min, the founder and artistic director of Cloudgate Dance Theater of Taiwan who has been almost single-handedly the inventor of professional dance for almost 35 years in Taiwan. It will be our pleasure to attend their opening night performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music next week.

I am looking ahead to the first of what we hope will be a regular event, Breaking Ground with Bill T. Jones at Harlem Stage at the Gatehouse. The series is conceived as a talk and encounter with personalities and thinkers around ideas and issues that are of interest to me personally or to the company as we find our place in the cultural landscape of New York City in general and Harlem in particular. The first encounter asks, "Is Harlem the capital of Black America and, if so, what does that mean?" I hope to see you there...

Catching Up

Yikes!!! So much has happened since April and now it’s summer…

Perhaps it’s the impromptu excursion with Sev, a young archeologist from Columbia University that has put me in a certain frame of mind. He said with a smile that his field is considered “dubious” in certain scientific quarters and dismissed as simple “storytelling.” I will resist the temptation to take you through all the layers of interlocking events that occurred over the past few months, resist the “too obvious story,” and touch on some significant events instead.

April 29 to May 6: Portugal:
Two well-attended and critically well-received performances of Blind Date in Lisbon’s beautiful Belem Cultural complex. A run out to Porto to participate in a retrospective of the 1980’s at the beautiful Seralves Foundation Museum and performing art centers. I delivered a rambling walk down memory lane on the first evening and Leah Cox and Shayla-Vie Jenkins gave a heroic performance of an excerpted Blauvelt Mountain as an illustration of what performance meant to Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane in the downtown performance world of the early 1980’s.

May 20 New York, Chanterelle Restaurant Annual Gala:
Bravo to Board Member Carol Tolan, the Benefit Committee and our staff for maintaining the tradition and pulling our 17th and most successful spring gala event to date! I admit I had some trepidation when it was proposed that the evening should honor me. However, in retrospect, the arresting portrait (naked again!) Annie Leibovitz provided for our menu, Terry Semel’s, Harvey Lichtenstein’s and Larry Goldhuber’s kind remarks, Mayor Bloomberg’s citation read by Andrea Smith, members of the company in an enigmatic non-verbal tribute, Daniel Bernard Roumain, Alicia Hall, Chris Lancaster and Andrea Smith moving musical excerpt from Chapel/Chapter and, most importantly the palpable sense of community and good will evident in the room, dispelled any misgivings I might have had.

May 28 to June 5, Singapore:
Singapore proved to be a rich and complex touring experience for the company. We were treated with utmost respect and the professionalism at every level was high. This fragment of an email written by Creative Director Bjorn Amelan to our European Agent Gillian Newson gives a hint as to what our time there was like:
“Singapore? Very mixed feelings between our dismay at the loss of whatever "feeling" of history and character there may have been to the place - all replaced by corporate and artificial entertainment - love of the food, very nice people, obvious iron fist control of the population, uncomfortable realization that, maybe, this is what it takes to shape a disparate population into an industrious, successful "nation" (I was told that since its independence, i.e., within circa 40 years, average income has risen from an average of S$500 to S$30,000 per year!)... It does feel like the future and that is sobering...

The performances of Blind Date in the glamorous “durian” shaped Esplanade Theater seem to have been very well received by audience and press. Ms. Yeo who heads the Arts Council came to say goodbye after our last performance. Though she is a difficult person to read, she seemed genuinely appreciative of the shows, happy with the audience's response and apologetic "not to have been able to deliver us with a larger audience." She told us that "her president and Chairman of the board" were both in attendance and enjoyed the show.”

I am left with questions as to how Blind Date’s preoccupation with nationhood and patriotism resonated in a city/state 43 years old that for all practical purposes has “no history…”

June 5: After 29 hours traveling we arrive at our home with the most peculiar case of jet-lag and discombobulation I have ever experienced.

After 24 hours at home, weeding and greedily savoring every new shoot and blossom in our garden, we drove groggily up to Albany “not knowing what time zone we were in” for a performance of Another Evening: I Bow Down which was part of our three week long residency at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY. Former company members Catherine Cabeen and Eric Bradley had launched our dance-intensive residency hosted by Skidmore College at the beginning of that week. Janet Wong, the brilliant architect of what turned out to be an extremely successful residency had arrived there the day before Bjorn and I did.

It was good to be reunited at Albany’s Egg Theater with the members of Regain the Heart Condemned whom we had not seen since our performances in Annemasse, France back in mid-April.

Though I had been doing an admirable job of downplaying any concerns about the Tony Awards, with each passing hour the drumbeat of excitement grew louder in my head and it was with apprehension that, following our Albany performance we drove ourselves back home for the “Tony Weekend!”

June 10, The Tony Ceremony:
By now everyone has heard of Spring Awakening winning 8 Tony Awards, one of which was mine for choreography (click here to see my acceptance speech on YouTube). Oh, what a night! I am still trying to figure out what happened and what it all means. Judging from the cascade of congratulations from persons near and far, 90 seconds on prime time TV seemed to have reached more people than 30 years in Contemporary Dance…

June 11 to 23, Skidmore College Residency, Saratoga Spring, NY:
Janet Wong in her typically comprehensive and precise plotting of this intensive created a framework that truly did explore the philosophy, theory and practice of our art from its inception in the realm of my interest and history to an ever growing community of personalities and concerns. We were proud to have been invited back for the third time to participate in this program.

The 32 students gave themselves to the theoretical aspects of the workshop: daily technique classes taught by Janet and the company, Tai-chi as taught by James Weston, contact/improvisation with Colleen Thomas, two spectacular workshops in text and movement as taught by David Gordon, repertory classes taught by Wen-Chung Lin and Shaneeka Harrell and my own composition workshop.

One of the high points was sitting with one of my dance heroes, David Gordon, during a public conversation. I remember how Arnie and I were intimidated and awed by the hegemony of “coolness” of “the big kids of the avant-garde” as represented by David and his wife, the marvelous actress/dancer Valda Setterfield. It was profoundly moving to hear David dispel my notions of the Judson Church “cabal” and tell of the conceptual fractures in that movement and of his feeling of kinship towards the work of the young storyteller I was when he saw my first performance at The Kitchen in 1979! If only I had known…

On another track, the Skidmore residency was an opportunity to further develop A Quarreling Pair. It was such an invigorating luxury to have the live musicians, the company, apprentices and actor Tracy Johnson on a daily schedule of exploration airing the results in two public rehearsals.

A reality of the company at this point is that people are coming and people are going. Here was an opportunity for that dynamic to occur in a lovely surrounding, defined by very clear ideas of history, teaching, creation and performance.

Oh yes, as if the awards and acknowledgements were not thick enough, I was humbled to be inducted into the Saratoga Springs’s National Museum of Dance’s Hall of Fame during this period. The ceremony as lead by the Museum’s Chair, Michele Riggi, and attended by the National Dance Teachers Conference, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company members, workshop participants and the local community was a moving and memorable event.

July 8 finds us in Woodbox, our retreat on the mesa of Northern NM, amid the austere grandeur of sunshine, rain, sagebrush, the mountains, sorting out what is story-telling and the archeology of events while looking ahead. Please stay tune for more developments:
• Taiwan performances of Blind Date (click here for more info)
• Chapel/Chapter touring version (click here for info on the performance at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts)
• Walking the Line, my solo performance in the Denon Gallery at the Louvre Museum in Paris (November 20, 22, 24) (click here for more info)
• Quarreling Pair premiere at Montclair State University’s Kasser Theater (11/30/07)
• Fela Project tentatively called Fela Is Alive
• Cultural Center/Home in Harlem

And that which we cannot foresee…

European Tour

Our room here at the Doelen Hotel in Amsterdam opens out to a canal that might well be described as the Amsterdam of the imagination. Because the changing weather and the heat that comes with it are a reality in traditionally cool Amsterdam as well, we sleep with the windows open. The hubbub and clamor of dreams and the interior space have now given way to the reality of this charming city’s waking and applying itself. The sounds of bicycles, the stolid chugging of a distant motorboat, construction equipment punctuated by the maniacal cries of seagulls and other water birds establish the place and the time.

The tour has been moving along with all the expected drama and some that is unexpected as well. I hark back to the first public event I gave which was a press conference in Milan. There, in the official splendor of Milan’s city hall, across the square from La Scala, a predictably late conversation with the press turned into something a bit more like one of our too familiar faux news programs inflected towards comedia dell’arte. In mid-answer to a question about the themes of Blind Date, Mr. Vittorio Sgarbi, the Commissioner of Cultural Affairs in Milan, took his place next to me. Catching a fragment of the translator’s rendering of my answer to the question about our present Bush administration’s evangelical motivations, as I understood it from Bjorn, the translator and, two days later, La Republica’s dance writer, he objected to my accusation of an American theocracy and roared back that the theocracy is with “the Muslims.” “I would respect you more if you were performing this work in Libya, Iran or among the Shia in Iraq. They are the ones who suppress freedom of speech…”
Mr. Sgarbi took my questioning of the present social-political discourse as typified by the Bush administration as an affront. He felt it was his duty to shout me down in the most aggressive way possible. At one point, I informed the room that I was going to leave if the conversation didn’t turn back to Blind Date and he said, “No I will leave,” which he did with a flourish. I was told later that this is his modus operandi, that he is a showman TV personality, a kind of performance artist who uses his bully pulpit in much the same way that American reality shows pump the ratings and pull press coverage thru dubious and uncontrolled confrontations.

The performances of Blind Date at the Teatro Arcimboldi however were quite successful and we moved on.

Annemasse is a suburb community on the French side of the Swiss border adjacent to Geneva. Regain the Heart Condemned and Wynne and DBR joined us there for the second of three performances of Another Evening: I Bow Down (the first had been a run out from Milan to Cremona with cellist/composer Chris Lancaster substituting for DBR). Here is a brand new, plain-faced, community that revealed itself to us as a hopeful social vision during our time there. Every hue of individual could be seen in the streets going about their lives as the French are wont to do amidst the cafes, cheese and butcher shops, antiquarians, book sellers, etc. The bounteous weekly Friday market spoke loads about the priorities of the French. This modern vision, post colonial, post socialist at a time when the country was gearing up for its presidential elections, was made all the more meaningful thru my knowledge of what it had been 63 years ago when Bjorn’s mother, Dora Amelan, as a member of an underground organization, was secreting Jewish children across the frontier into Switzerland thru Annemasse. At that time, Annemasse was just another undistinguished French village among farms and fields caught in the German occupation. In our “circle” before the show wherein musicians, dancers, Janet Wong, Bjorn and myself collect to focus, I made a point of telling them how proud I was that not only that Dora succeeded in saving lives at that dark time, but that her son was amongst our ranks now as we indulge in the promise that defeating that enemy proposed.

And now, we’re here in Amsterdam, arguably the most liberal social experiment in the world. So many of the hot buttons in divisive issues (Gay rights, Gay marriage, legalized soft drugs, state subsidies for the arts, universal health care, etc) are a fact of life here. Speaking to a journalist for the Amsterdam weekly sometime back she was very interested in the Muslim question in Blind Date. Other than Asli Bulbul’s discussion of the modern Turkish flag, I told her that the work did not really deal in those specific polemics or dissections. I told her that it deals more in the bigger questions for all of us in “the West”. What do we believe in so strongly that we would fight to protect? I asked her if young Dutch choreographers and artists felt so strongly about their liberties and their heritage of progress and openness that they would die for these? Because she was interviewing me and not the other way around, this question went unanswered. Like global warming and the changes that it is inflicting on us, this question of values will not go away and, in fact, grows stronger each year. Blind Date was forged by this line of thought and now finds its life here as well.

A Guest Blogger

Happy Spring!

We’ve just returned from an intense, but ultimately gratifying week of performances Paris’s La Maison des Arts in Créteil. My fears about the American nature of Blind Date in France at this time have proved unfounded. The piece was wonderfully received and has refreshed my insight into the French public. Still there is a mystery to every engagement and part of that mystery is that the world of the company and the city, the country where it performs are seldom clearly joined.

In my blog, I am often the sole protagonist. I have decided to try and expand this role by inviting in guests. This blog entry showcases company dancer Charley Scott, an avid Francophile and aspiring writer.

Charley Scott performing in Chapel/Chapter. Photo by Paul B. Goode

Charley has graciously responded to the request I made of him to talk about a couple of things:

On Paris:
“On this tour to France I am reminded again how much this country, this culture, has been a part of my way of appreciating life and words, how it has informed my aesthetic: in very small things like the logical progression of courses at a meal or in the formality of common interactions on the street or with people you meet - which is not to say the arrogance or coldness that Americans expect of the French - but rather a respect for the privacy of the other and for time itself which allows a relationship to unfold in a more patient and realistic way. Here there is a different sense of time and what is expected of it, how quickly it advances and retreats.”

Tough Questions:
“Walking around down by the old center of town, Ile de la Cité near the Palais de Justice, I saw a paper posted on the wall of a building. It was a reproduction of the call to arms made by de Gaulle in June 1940 after the Vichy government surrendered to the German army and began its collaboration with the Nazis. I was filled with pride reading the triumphal language: "France has lost a battle! But France has not lost the war!...I invoke the French people to unite with me in action, sacrifice, and hope...VIVE LA FRANCE!" and wondered again to myself what I would have done in the early 1940s if I had been a young French man with big dreams of my own, or a German father afraid of risking his children's lives to oppose the national insanity.

In post-performance discussions following our shows Bill has talked about the source material for and the process of making Blind Date. In this process he asked the dancers "What would you fight for? What would you be willing to die for?" Seeing de Gaulle's call posted in the streets of Paris, I quickly came to the decision that as a Frenchman in 1940 I would have gladly fought and given my life for France and its incredible culture of "liberty and grandeur," as de Gaulle himself described it. And then against that certainty, I knew that I would also not be willing to die in the present war in Iraq, at least not for its official reasons, or for its declared goal of spreading a particular brand of liberty. I wonder what it would take for me at this moment in time to take up arms and fight for America: another disaster? a personal attack on my family? What would it take for me to fight for the people being raped and dismembered and burned daily in Darfur? Apparently it will take more than them being raped and dismembered and burned.”

A Final Resting Place:
“I spent one morning in Paris in the Père Lachaise cemetery. I like being in cemeteries, and this one in particular is spectacular with mausoleums the size of small homes, beautiful tributes to the dead in a range of 19th and 20th century styles. I had actually wanted to see the tomb of Marcel Proust, having recently embarked on what will certainly be a life-long journey of reading the Proust novel in French, and needing for my trip some objective so as not to wander too aimlessly in a sea of tombs. This cemetery is full those who created art, or designed social policy, or earned honor for the country at war, and it made me wonder when my culture would devise such a resting place for its assorted heroes including artists (imagine if we could have buried James Brown in Arlington Cemetery!) As I sat and looked at Colette's simple resting place I thought about the US and its confused relationship with art and artists. I wondered if it would ever be able too commit to supporting its art community in the way that France and Germany and much of Western Europe have. But it also occurred to me that despite this lack of support, there is a thriving and progressive art culture in the US which may actually play off of, depend upon, and be inspired by an active rejection of the effect of national fear and a return to fundamentalist values.

If we were too comfortable with ourselves as artists or as members of society would we still feel the need to talk and work?”

Before the Show:
“Bill, watching me backstage every night before our performance, asked me recently about my warm-up routine. He often sees me frantically preparing for a show back stage wherever there is room, usually thrashing about in the dark with my headphones on. We all have such different ways of preparing. I feel like the vigorous warm-up is required to jolt me out of what often feels like a nerve-induced hibernation before a show. When I get nervous I tend to turn inward, and physicality, physical exertion, is my way out of that situation. I've always used movement as a way of connecting myself to the world, exertion as a liberating agent, freeing me from self-criticism and energizing me. So my warm-up works best when it is structured to convert nervous energy into a calm confident weighted exhaustion.”

Charley Scott – NY, March 25, 2007

Another Birthday

Wow! What a birthday season this has been!
As time passes, I cringe more at the ritual of acknowledging my birthday. This year, I had hoped to keep a low profile and, maybe, avoid the uncomfortable-ness of all that particular kind of attention. But it was not to be and I am glad.

My birthday fell on the second day of the company’s shooting an international print campaign for Puma fashion. The concept was to place dancers in high-energy situations amidst explosions of color pigments while wearing Puma’s shoes and clothes and carrying bags. I arrived at the shoot at lunchtime and was alerted that they would be trying a pyrotechnical test, which we were welcome to watch. As I stood there with my fingers over my ears, there was a flash, an explosion of pigments framed by a suspended heart in the photographic space. I’m always a little slow in such setups, so it was only when everybody started singing “Happy Birthday,” that I realized what was happening. And a happy birthday it was. The dancers, old and new, looking beautiful and putting out 150%, being appreciated by the photographer and the rest of the staff.

That evening, sharing a meal at one of our favorite Japanese restaurants with a former chair of the board and a present board member I was asked by one of the two, “What are you thinking right now?” I took this to mean, “What are you working on?”

The 25th Anniversary Season calls for a new evening length work. It’s not a big clear idea like Blind Date or a pièce d’occasion that catches fire like Another Evening: I Bow Down nor even an intense, site specific commission like Chapel/Chapter, but at this time it is simply a huge capacity I feel that is longing to be articulated and filled. What I do have as a seed is a curious puppet play written by the great short story writer, Jane Bowles, in the 1940’s called The Quarreling Pair. Like everything else in this curiosity, the cast is small: two; the space is small: a space divided down its middle creating what the playwright calls “two rooms,” one for the bigger, slightly more bossy Harriet and the other for her phlegmatic and introverted sister, Rhoda. The action is attenuated, a conversation that explodes into violence at one point in which we learn more about their differences: world views - Harriet is a pragmatist, orderly and self-contented; Rhoda is tired, depressed, unable to succor the sick or even to think about their dead. She is so tired and sad. Rhoda declares she has a large heart and Harriet, nonplussed, insists she has a small one, “Like Papa’s was.” Each puppet sings a song, eerie and introspective. One gets punched - the other gets pushed. The ever-mysterious glass of milk that drives the action is spilt and they make up as someone admits they are glad the day is over and they are nervously exhausted.
What?!!!
What am I thinking?

I have been involved with this story in different ways since 1992 or 93. I remember dividing my then group into couples and allowing them each to tackle the play as they saw fit. I have the image of the giant Larry Goldhuber and petite Heidi Latsky bound across their middle with an elastic thera-band. When Larry and Heidi left the company to pursue a duet company, they created a wry, engaging duet titled It’s Not What You Think. I assumed that that piece was the result of that day when the two of them wrestled with their physicality, their difference and Jane Bowles’s slyly diffident text.

So why is it back again? Maybe it’s a remnant of the opposition work we did in reflecting the 2004 election in Blind Date. There, name-calling and taking sides were important metaphors. Perhaps it’s me trying once again to understand my ever-growing feeling of being somehow or other hermetic in attitude and understanding of a world that threatens to place me in a little room, like Harriet or Rhoda, with my artwork, my personality, the means I employ to shout over the barrier, the barricade, “the line in the sand.”

Jane Bowles’s play is so attenuated, so bizarrely humorous and plain-faced that it should lend itself to various treatments. It should be able to be a miniature about relationships, story telling and child’s play and other treatments that could be more “maximalist” with big groups facing off, with the humble queer songs as introspective soliloquies or triumphal anthems.

Right now, I am feeling supported, loved and loving towards persons, ideas and even institutions. This bifurcated, oppositional world that Jane Bowles describes here is a provocation to me. How to hold this nugget of a literary invention to the light to be examined as one would an intimate thing like a poem, or a piece of jewelry, or a well-crafted tool, and yet be able to explode it, make incisions in its surface that can be propped open, penetrated, rearranged? That’s what I am thinking, or I should say, feeling.

Hopefully, in a year, there will be a work and this work will be offered to presenters and audiences around the world. Would that it should have had the charm and color of a popular theater work such as Spring Awakening that I choreographed. Something that could have audiences leave the theater with a fragment of song in their heads or some affecting bit of staging or ribald humor that will stay with them for days. Whatever it is, can it stand on its own two feet? Can people see themselves in it? Can it help me and the dancers and, yes, our administration and board even to stretch, be more bold and clear in our mission?

How will it be understood around the world? I have included here a communication we received from Bob Yesselman of Dance/NYC, concerning a session presented by the Dance Working Group, a consortium of dance organizations just prior to the official opening of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters conference (APAP) on Friday, January 19, 2007. It’s dangerous for an artist just beginning a new work to think too much about the world that will receive it. But then again, it’s not unreasonable to do so.

Please read the article and, perhaps it will make clearer the difficulty of answering my friend’s question the other night over our accidental birthday dinner.

Bill T. Jones

On Friday, January 19th, just prior to the official opening of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters conference (APAP), I attended a session presented by the Dance Working Group, a consortium of dance organizations, among them Dance/USA, that each year present a forum for ideas looking at big picture issues in dance.
Each year, the Dance Working Group chooses a topic both relevant to what's going on now in dance, and provocative in the ideas put forth. This year was no exception. The topic was How American Dance is Viewed by the Rest of the World and provocative was an understatement. The session was moderated by Carolelinda Dickey, principal consultant of Performing Arts Strategies, working in international exchange (a former member of the NYC dance community and former presenter) and facilitated by Andrea Snyder, Executive Director of Dance/USA. The four speakers were:
• Cees de Bever: Director of Performing Arts, Consulate General of the Netherlands
• Jennifer Barry: Director of Dance Down Under (Australia) and a producer of dance
• Mark Staub: Director of Dance for the Canada Council
• Mayumi Nagatosi: Director of AN Creative (Japan) and a producer of dance

I must stress that each speaker spoke about perceptions abroad and each was quick to acknowledge they were speaking in generalities. I will try very hard not to editorialize. Here's what they had to say:

Cees de Bever (Netherlands)
* Production values of American dance are very low which places our work at a competitive disadvantage in the market place. Cees was very quick to point out that he was very aware of the financial conditions under which we operate in the U.S.
* American dancers are not as well-trained or strong as they once were.
* While many countries financially support native companies to tour abroad; there was very little reciprocity for American companies.
* Since so few American companies are touring abroad, there is very little knowledge of the vast diversity of American dance.
* We are not helped by the current political image of America abroad.
Cees had some recommendations:
* Take a hard look at which American companies are really suitable for export.
* Study international exchange programs closely and adapt to American reality.
* Find the money to bring international presenters to the U.S. to build relationships just as many countries bring American presenters to see their work.

Jennifer Barry (Australia)
* There seems to be a huge focus on the body in American work and promotional materials (she mentioned having received hundreds of postcards from American companies prior to APAP and that every single one was a body image) as opposed to dance in Australia which is much more concerned with concept.
* American dance does not display a cohesive integration of design, lighting and music (production values again).
* Australians tend to resist American-style hype and "showbiz."
* There is much less reverence for the American "masters" - they are perceived as old-fashioned.
* There is a sense that American dance is overly concerned with "pretty" work as opposed to the character-drive, narrative work now popular abroad.
* Australia's subsidy system allows artists the freedom to make less commercially-driven work.
* There is the sense that American dance lacks humor and is very "earnest" with a preoccupation with, in her words, "the pure essence of dance."

Mark Staub (Canada)
* Many in Canada associate American dance as being of a very specific time (the 60's and 70's) and place (NYC).
* Dancers in Canada know the "masters," and many of them have studied with them, but have very little knowledge of what else is happening in American dance.

Mayumi Nagatosi (Japan)
* There is a sense in Japan that American dance's time is over and that in the last 15 years European dance has become more important.
* The current generation of Japanese choreographers have been influenced by European artists, not American.
* American dance is perceived, in her words, as "old-fashioned" and "boring."

I came away from the session with what seemed to be two major themes. First, the lack of production values in current American work coming, I think, from two sources - our chronic lack of money (if we can get a work to a stage in street clothes we consider ourselves lucky) and, as the Australian speaker mentioned, our focus on the body alone in space and our concern with the "essence" of dance. Let me be clear, I attach no value judgments to either of these viewpoints - that's what makes soccer matches. Secondly, that American work is perceived as old-fashioned and still beholding to our great pioneers and masters. Again, it seems to me, money is partly the culprit. We have so little export of current American dance nowadays that this perception is, in part, understandable. I also found it interesting to note that two of the speakers and many members of the audience also mentioned that they had all come to the U.S. (NYC in particular) for study and training.
It was quite a morning.

-Bob Yesselman

A New Year

As the last “Me!” was shouted and bows were taken, as we moved offstage, gratified, and unsettled offering each other congratulations, a gentle squeeze of thanks to our stage manager Kyle Maude’s shoulder, I heard someone in the cast say: “We did it! Our first show of 2007!” This was a performance of Blind Date at the Krannert Center in Champaign-Urbana, IL. And yet 2007 seems to be in full swing.

Since returning home from holidays in snowy New Mexico, I commenced the first workshop on a new yet unnamed musical theater work about the life of legendary inventor of Afro-beat Fela Anikulapu Kuti. This was followed by a workshop for dancers lead by Janet, myself and the company called Beautiful Movement/Ugly World. A few days later, we did two intense days of auditioning as dancers Wen Chung Lin and Shaneeka Harrell will be leaving us. I would like this to be simply a re-imagining of our relationship with these two wonderful artists, not a goodbye! And, of course, the ever dutiful Janet Wong has been putting us through our paces in company rehearsals for the Champaign-Urbana performance of Blind Date and Another Evening: I Bow Down at New Jersey’s Performing Arts Center (NJPAC) in Newark next weekend.

As you can see, January 2007 has had its richness!

Going into the Fela Kuti workshop, I had serious doubts as to how stage-appropriate were the life and work of this “sacred monster” who took the very common ambition and drive of a talented musician and, through a preternatural display of intelligence and will, made a revolution in popular music the spring board for a political movement that challenged one of the most corrupt regimes on the planet: the government of Nigeria. We discovered in this ambitious seven-rehearsal period that Fela’s ecstatic dance music with its political themes could frame introspection and even the psychology of its creator. Fela Kuti’s psychology was a constant battle between that of mystical transcendentalist and provocateur, mad as hell about what’s wrong in this world and willing to go to any end to confront it. I am really grateful to dramaturg Jim Lewis, my assistant director Niegel Smith, A.J. a veteran of the Afro-Beat ensemble Antibalas, and Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane’s very own Maija Garcia who brilliantly inhabited her role as African dance consultant. Stay tuned to more as this process continues over the next year.

Beautiful Movement/Ugly World showed the company as a generous and ever maturing group of artists and teachers interacting with a diverse group of performers at various stages of development. One of my favorite images of this workshop was in the early stages of its daily class watching as Janet Wong lead the literally wall to wall participants through a stretching, rolling, breathing exercise as Leah Cox or Stuart Singer, Asli Bulbul or Erick Montes and others moved discreetly about the room, offering small corrections, adjustments and encouragements to the participants. This image holds in it the fulfillment of the promise that our company develops artists, thinkers and teachers.

Winter Workshop Participants with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company

On a related note, as I confessed regularly to the participants in the workshop, for whatever reason I found it much easier to move the group to fulsome, thoughtful and dynamic movement - Beautiful Movement - as opposed to whatever I intended months ago when I offered the notion of Ugly World! Was I being too facile when I said with some resignation that the “ugly world” part is always within and without us and that there is no rigid barrier between the sacred work we do called dance and this medium called the outside world? Nonetheless, the atmosphere of seriousness and community was encouraging and prepares us for an upcoming three week long residency at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY (June 3 to 23).

The company’s auditions held at the Trisha Brown Studios last week is a complex memory as well. The 421 women and 78 men there to be scrutinized underline a basic and troubling truth about the dance world. There are so many dreams and, unfortunately and in some cases tragically, they are often unrealized. After the first grueling morning, in the afternoon a young woman returned and asked to speak with me. Her eyes were red from crying and she confessed that having danced some years in a situation she found unfulfilling she was at her wits’ end as to what to do next. As I had just rejected her, could I tell her what was I not seeing or might she be working on? It was a doubly uncomfortable moment: I had seen so many candidates and even with the best intentions on my, Janet and the company’s part to treat each person individually and give them opportunities to show themselves, I could not remember this woman’s movement. This is one of the truths I tried to impart to a group of dance students at the University of IL in Champaign-Urbana. The legendary New York audition “cattle call” is very real and cruel. I do not relish sitting in judgment of other artists, particularly when they are vulnerable and needy of affirmation and, more directly, of a job. Still, that is the role that I am assigned. There is a tendency to head off this inevitability by subjecting young people to the harsh light of the competitiveness and economic realities of the dance-world when they are still young enough to consider other avenues of expression and livelihood. When one crushes the dream of anyone, particularly a young one, one has to take the responsibility for potentially destroying some unpredictable potential or greatness as well.

Blind Date’s first 2007 performance found us making cuts, a privilege though it’s a mystery to me why it takes me so long to see the need to make certain alterations. A good portion of the audience stayed behind for the question and answer session. Some of the more interesting exchanges were actually statements designed as questions. For the first time ever someone commented on the metaphorical meaning of the different squares in Bjorn Amelan’s design implying that there was some reference to territory, national boundaries and the spaces that separate us as people. One young woman gave an impassioned critique of the section wherein Andrea Smith reads a list of natural and man-made disasters since 1995. She said that I/we had failed to once mention Israel, that is “one of the most important conflicts in our world…”

And now onward and a return to Another Evening: I Bow Down with DBR, Wynne Bennett and Regain the Heart Condemned.

A Labor of Love

“When love empties itself out,
It fills our bodies full.”
-Donald Hall, US Poet Laureate

The poet is most certainly referring to the moment after lovemaking and as we often say, creation is a labor of love. This morning following our week at The Gatehouse premiering Chapel/Chapter should feel like that moment after lovemaking. So, as I appropriate Hall’s metaphor, I am forced to acknowledge that I don’t in fact feel full, but depleted - satisfied, yes, but still, temporarily depleted.

The tremendous effort on our part to install Bjorn Amelan’s acres of red material, Janet Wong’s evocative projections, Robert Wierzel’s elegant lighting and the energy of the irrepressible dancers wrestling with material that is tough emotionally and physically, as well as Daniel Bernard Roumain’s efforts in leading the musical ensemble in a complex and moving musical accompaniment, made for one of the most difficult weeks we could encounter. This encounter was made more manageable by the tireless contribution of costume designer Liz Prince and the wondrous “missal” created by Real Design which each audience member left with.

And we did it! And people came! And it was written about and discussed in thoughtful impassioned ways! And now it’s over…

Questions remain: what’s next with this labor of love? Its site-specific nature will always make it a challenge to move and remount. Its content as well. One of my collaborators confessed/confided after the fact that - having had a friend brutally murdered some years ago and having never truly dealt with it - the murder in the piece had almost undone her (though she never expressed it as we were working). Even now, as she acknowledges the success of the work, I sense the lingering question: do we as artists have the right to use such stories inasmuch as they are the cool, distant reporting of tragedy and horror? And my response is that we as artists have to trust ourselves and attempt to do the best we can as these stories are with us always and we must find a way to understand them, or at least grapple with what connects us to them.

On another level, there was an undeniable sense of accomplishment within our company’s administration, but likewise in our ongoing relationship with Harlem Stage. Pat Cruz and Brad Learmonth have done a heroic deed in getting the Gatehouse on its feet and commissioning four works; one of which was Chapel/Chapter. Too seldom in this present dance-world can we point to ongoing collaborations such as we have had with Harlem Stage. This collaboration is soon to see fifteen years or so!

And yes, speaking of lovemaking, Spring Awakening had its premiere at the O’Neill Theater the night after we closed at Harlem Stage. For those who can remember the terrifying momentum of desire that lead to their first sexual experience, this ambitious, tuneful spectacle of youth striving for awareness should strike a deep resonances. Producers and those of us in the creative team are mildly shocked at the overwhelming praise the piece has received so far. Let’s see what happens…

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