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September 2007
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...
-- (Monday, September 24, 2007)
