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July 2007
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…
-- Bill T. Jones (Monday, July 9, 2007)
