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November 2007
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.
-- Bill T. Jones (Monday, November 5, 2007)
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