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May 2006
Memorial Day
Memorial Day...
Bjorn's 86 years old mother, Dora, has just flown back to Paris on this most American of holidays. This month of her visit was an opportunity to show off to this French born Jewish survivor of World War II, American culture and performances. Oddly enough, what I remember most is an American/German hybrid. It was interesting to see Billie Forsythe's Kamer/Kamer at the Brooklyn Academy of Music thru her eyes. She found it incomprehensible. I praised the structure and the use of technology. I criticized the content of the narratives… Rather than being two stories of dysfunctional relationships (both homosexual), could at least one of them have been a story about war? Or race? Or fundamentalist belief? Or the future of democracy? Or...? Something that would lead this generation of young, moneyed, educated, out of this narcissistic hall of mirrors we seem to be trapped in.
Memorial Day...
The Moussaoui trial, indictment and sentencing: there was something chilling in the judge's last words to a man about to be buried alive. Something to the effect, "Everyone in this courtroom will leave here able to go wherever they want to, to feel light on their faces and breathe fresh air. You will never be heard from again..." Bjorn and his mother remind me of the French word oublier: to forget from which derives "oubliette," a hole in the floor of medieval castles where an absolute lord could drop those he deemed worthy of being forgotten. Chapel/Chapter, our new work for Harlem Stage's WaterWorks wants to talk of a contemporary sacred space, but it’s impossible to have a notion of the "sacred" without some understanding of its relationship to "evil" and the space we have created that is, in fact, an oubliette. What do we do with evil people? Can we make a dance about the questions facing those of us who see themselves as "good" or "progressive" and our relation to "evil" people?
Memorial Day... "Oubliette"...
Had an interview with Seattle's "On the Boards" director, Lane Czaplinski, today. He has taken on the task of defending Chapel/Chapter for its inclusion in the National Dance Program (NDP), which helps underwrite the touring of new works. One question he asked me was: "The panel will want to know how Chapel/Chapter will be a catalyst for the development of your work." I spoke about community, yet another return to a more personalized touring work, how it would encourage me to slow down as the touring life of the company gives one the impression of being on a bullet train, moving thru a vast and alien landscape of theaters, presenters, audiences and communities. All that is true, but more importantly, it's giving the company and me an opportunity to connect what we do to this nagging question from above: "What about evil and forgetting?"
Memorial Day?
-- Bill T. Jones (Tuesday, May 30, 2006)
Bill's Speech at Tides Foundation
On Friday, April 28, Bill T. Jones was the keynote speaker at the Momentum 2006 conference hosted by the Tides Foundation in San Francisco, CA. Here is an excerpt from the speech he gave:
Some words: Desire, Will, Courage, Service
Culture has been described as the "well stocked mind." I am here as an advocate for culture, the place wherein creativity, ideas, ideals and action reside.
I am going to start with desire:
As an artist, I have been described as being what the French call "militant" or "engaged." I am often asked what should an artist do. I say the artist does not have to a damn thing, but be the freest person in the society running - sometimes literally - naked through the streets thumbing his or her nose at all dogma and received wisdom. But an artist is a man or a woman with a location in the society, a class, a gender, a sexual orientation and a worldview. What does that individual that is the artist desire or need to do? And that is my burning question everyday; the one that I trust unites us. What are my effort, my art and my life at the service of?
I desire: I desire to be no slave to fear, to be clear in thought and action, to be compassionate and, yes, to be safe, loving and loved. I want to hold up my end of the social contract - to be an effective citizen. And you?
The conference’s organizers describe this as a meeting of "people who identify as donors currently funding or looking for ways to fund positive social change."
I feel what we desire makes us who we are. I am a man who desires to be a creator and an artist. I also desire to organize the efforts of others. As Artistic Director of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company I make dance-theater spectacles and I dance. Yes, but I have also been building an enterprise, a community, over the last 25 years or so. Movement is the basic language, but by no means the only one.
I have to pause here for a moment. Our bodies are mysterious. As mysterious as the social contract that connects them to one another. My body was maturing at a time when the world, like now, seemed on the brink of exploding. The historians in the room could certainly tell us of the profusion of armed struggles in Africa and Asia, of the Weather Men here in this country and of student violence around the world. I have always said that I started dancing because athletics could not answer to the need I had for a brand of lyrical, sweaty effort that was more like singing and had no easily describable winners or objectives. But I think that that dissatisfaction was also determined by my need to find another way to live in this body and to answer to the social contract.
Across the Bay, at the galleries of the Yerba Buena Center, there is a remarkable show celebrating the 40th anniversary of the foundation of the Black Panther’s movement. It is an ambitious show that uses photographs and artifacts of the period and artworks created by an array of artists that reflect on the conditions and circumstances that forced a movement like the Black Panthers into existence. At the beginning of the show, there are some heartbreakingly beautiful portraits of young people listening to a speaker at a rally. What is so moving in these photos is that these people, though certainly angry, had a sense of hope and possibility in their faces. What the organizers of the show have made very clear is that for all of its flaws and shortsightedness, this was a powerful movement in that it was at its core a cultural movement. It was trying to relieve people’s suffering by feeding them, expanding their awareness and giving them a new language. And yet it failed for any number of reasons. But what did not die and never does is the expectant hopefulness, like a spirit, that permeates every aspect of this show. It was around this time that I decided - though I did not realize I was making a decision - that I would channel that anger, hopefulness and expectation, that I would hold up my end of the social contract and be an effective citizen, by becoming an artist, and not by picking up a gun!
Of course, at that time the preoccupations of the 19 years old that I was could only see in dancing a doorway into the "counterculture" (whatever happened to that term?). This was not the counterculture of the Black Panthers, but of Woodstock, Free Love, "Turn on, Tune in, Drop out…"
Let me make a checklist of what dance represented to me at that time:
1. Freedom: As I said, this new activity demanded sweat, but a different, more exotic and socially risky sort of sweat. Dancing demanded surrender, and individuality and vulnerability: a type of social interaction missing in athletics.
2. Race: At that time both Alvin Ailey and The Dance Theater of Harlem were in their ascendancy, celebrated, harvesting the fruits of a long struggle. Blacks and what would come to be termed "people of color" were ambassadors, artists/activists commanding firmly the moral high ground that came with a history of disenfranchisement. This particular door had already been opened for me…
3. Gender and sexuality: From my 19 year old perspective, many major modern dance figures were women (Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Twyla Tharp, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Pearl Primus, Catherine Dunham …) and/or gay men (Alvin Ailey, Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Eleo Pomare, Alwin Nikolai, Murray Louis, Louis Falco, etc.). In the avant-garde, experimental forms like contact improvisation promised a world of dancing wherein all traditional power politics such as who was lifted or who did the lifting, who was supported by whom, who was allowed shows of strength and who delicacy, were being challenged. It was a relief and a revelation that yes, anyone could dance with anyone regardless of gender, sexual orientation, race. Issues of age, class and disability would come later.
4. And because space was cheap and many of us lived communally, dance offered an alternative to the 9 to 5 reality most of us had been raised to expect: whether children of migrant workers like myself or refugees from the middle classes that filled the ranks of the contemporary modern dance scene.
That’s how it started… But soon came the awareness that there was a grand tradition that used dancing to speak: choreography. "How to speak" and "about what" has preoccupied me for the past 35 years or so.
I was piqued a couple of days ago, when I read the lead editorial in the NY Times which dealt with President Bush’s response to the recent Senatorial debate on immigration. "… (The president) blandly labeled the Senate compromise an "interesting approach," as if he were pondering a piece of modern art rather than the fate of something central to his domestic agenda." What bothered me in this is the unstated assumption by the editorialist that modern art can readily be summarized as merely "interesting." Interesting? In a world ever more filled with mind numbing mediocrity and stupidity, perhaps one should be satisfied that modern art is associated with the word "interesting." And yet when I look at the intense hopefulness captured in the faces of the young warriors on view at Yerba Buena, when I remember my own 19 year old chest about to explode, I realize "interesting" is not enough!
But still, Blind Date is a work of art. It finds me continuing:
• To articulate the potential in human movement.
• To discover, assign and expand the meaning of such movement, for myself, for my dancers and for whoever will give it their attention.
• To strive towards the beautiful.
At the same time, this art is part of an even more ambitious enterprise, as always, driven by the attempt to address the social contract on my terms and in the new world and this is where I hope that our desires commingle.
• Community Building: first a dance company, like any other cultural institution must define its ever-evolving form and mission. The dance company is difficult to sustain, but I do so because it has become a place where people can be developed: from children to adult, from students to teachers, from alienated seekers to members of a community. Here we create strong-minded citizens who question authority and are skilled in negotiating differences with their strong-minded peers. In my group, aesthetics and forms are paramount, but must always be understood within a broader social/historical discourse. This community works to finds its place in an even larger community or coalition of supporters, sponsors, presenters, funders, fellow artists/collaborators and witnesses like you.
• And lastly and most importantly: Participating in the world of ideas.
After some 30 years of practicing all the above, we are on the brink of acquiring a permanent "Home" in Harlem. Harlem promises to be one of the most cosmopolitan locations in the United States. My organization wishes to put down roots there and grow a research laboratory of sorts. Yes, it will house our dance company, but it will also be a place where others at different stages of their careers can build works and experiment. We will develop a lecture series, open to artists, scholars, innovators in literature, new media, performance, music, visual arts and film. It is my hope that people, as diverse as my company is diverse, can meet and exchange notions: art and politics, aesthetics and still others that will announce themselves when the time is right.
So I am creating an organization that is a community within a community, acting as a tool (a weapon?), sorting out, weighing and giving form to ideas.
Have I answered the question: "what is this effort, this art at the service of?"
Let me try one more time. Celebrated cellist, Yo-Yo Ma has been known to say that there are three engines driving society: the political, the economic and the cultural. In this infuriating and confusing era when the first two are running on empty, he says that it is now that the cultural engine must go into overdrive. I think we know what he means. We have to make a pact; we have to be serious about a cultural movement. Look at the faces on the Yerba Buena’s gallery walls and then look at the mirror. Is the spirit still there? I am striving to make my efforts of thirty years part of this engine and I invite you to do the same. That is our mission right now. As you well know and as this conference proves, there is so much to be done. And yet nothing is more important than this.
-- Bill T. Jones (Wednesday, May 3, 2006)
