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October 2006
"Political" Work?
It seemed to have started shortly after we returned from Brazil when I received a request for an interview from The Guardian in London (read article here). The writer, who I had spoken to prior to our company’s 20th Anniversary Celebration at BAM, wanted to know what my feelings were about how effective dance could be in dealing with political subject matters. It seems that William Forsythe's new Three Atmospheric Studies that deals with the Iraqi war has set the European dance world atwitter. The question in variation has been directed at me five or six times over the past month in various interviews. At least three of the five or so I have done for our company's upcoming performances of Blind Date in Melbourne have asked this question. After years of dealing with this question, I now choose to fire back that "political" is an exhausted term and most certainly more and more irrelevant in regard to my work. To make a work that says, "War is bad!" is absurd. I find myself saying with growing confidence that the works that I make now are concerned with moral choice as in, "What is the right thing to do, particularly when we seem to have many choices and no real choice at all?"
Much of Blind Date and Another Evening: I Bow Down is a demonstration of a kind of paralysis. My character in Blind Date, who has every intention of quitting smoking but never does, is really not talking about his inability to shake a minor addiction. And in Another Evening: I Bow Down references to disasters and flood here at home and elsewhere in the world are not intended as indictment of any regime or administration, but instead ask the question if we can't blame a vindictive god anymore, or rely on our imperfect elected representatives to protect us from disaster, what can we do?
To my mind this is a question about "right action," as it is understood by individuals and, particularly, individuals who pride themselves of a progressive view of the world.
It was with some tender feelings of dislocation that I watched my dancers Stuart Singer and Erick Montes performing a curious duet developed by Lawrence Goldhuber and Arthur Aviles over 16 years ago as Larry and Arthur stood on the sidelines watching. This duet was an important moment in the reconstruction of excerpts of Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land that we performed last week at City Center’s Fall for Dance Festival. The sequence of events in the three-hour-long original version of Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land leads up to this duet which appeared in the final act. Larry Goldhuber in all his corpulence, humor and menace had been seen as the Aunt Jemima-like wife of Uncle Tom; as Simon Legree whipping Tom; later as one of the Dogs dressed in muzzle, black underwear, and combat boots; and as a member of a post-modern chorus of dancers. He comes back in this duet as a huge foil of support and threat for Arthur Aviles - mercurial as always, with a gymnast's surety of attack and fearlessness - who performs the duet sequence a second time completely naked. In the original version this second variation appears easily two and half hours into the piece, drawing resonance from the images of the slave epic complete with overtly religious images of saints and whipping. Taken out of the context of the original epic, everything in this excerpt was more talismanic, a kind of touchstone to bigger issues: power, spirituality, history, race...
Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech backward promises that the work would be about race and the Civil Rights struggle, but our current climate - following Abu-Ghraib, a ludicrous debate on the Geneva Convention and the proper treatment of detainees defined by our president as 'enemy combatants' - gives a jerk and a twist to the duet as Stuart Singer in the Larry Goldhuber role mimes the ritual whipping of a naked Erick Montes in the Arthur Aviles role. The abuse of a minority as depicted effectively in 1851 by Harriet Beecher Stowe and perhaps even from the 1990’s vantage point of the original Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land safely removed from the "troubles" of the 1960's allows this image to be safely polemical and understandable as a kind of reference to social protest in art. However, last week - for me at least - this moment of whipping a naked man who later stands vulnerable, performing shapes of devotion surrounded by an anonymous group which catches him when he falls to push him back into the ritual as lights go down, is not really political anymore. It’s asking the question: "Why does this continue to happen?" And: "What does it have to do with me?"
-- Bill T. Jones (Wednesday, October 4, 2006)
