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January 2007
A New Year
As the last “Me!” was shouted and bows were taken, as we moved offstage, gratified, and unsettled offering each other congratulations, a gentle squeeze of thanks to our stage manager Kyle Maude’s shoulder, I heard someone in the cast say: “We did it! Our first show of 2007!” This was a performance of Blind Date at the Krannert Center in Champaign-Urbana, IL. And yet 2007 seems to be in full swing.
Since returning home from holidays in snowy New Mexico, I commenced the first workshop on a new yet unnamed musical theater work about the life of legendary inventor of Afro-beat Fela Anikulapu Kuti. This was followed by a workshop for dancers lead by Janet, myself and the company called Beautiful Movement/Ugly World. A few days later, we did two intense days of auditioning as dancers Wen Chung Lin and Shaneeka Harrell will be leaving us. I would like this to be simply a re-imagining of our relationship with these two wonderful artists, not a goodbye! And, of course, the ever dutiful Janet Wong has been putting us through our paces in company rehearsals for the Champaign-Urbana performance of Blind Date and Another Evening: I Bow Down at New Jersey’s Performing Arts Center (NJPAC) in Newark next weekend.
As you can see, January 2007 has had its richness!
Going into the Fela Kuti workshop, I had serious doubts as to how stage-appropriate were the life and work of this “sacred monster” who took the very common ambition and drive of a talented musician and, through a preternatural display of intelligence and will, made a revolution in popular music the spring board for a political movement that challenged one of the most corrupt regimes on the planet: the government of Nigeria. We discovered in this ambitious seven-rehearsal period that Fela’s ecstatic dance music with its political themes could frame introspection and even the psychology of its creator. Fela Kuti’s psychology was a constant battle between that of mystical transcendentalist and provocateur, mad as hell about what’s wrong in this world and willing to go to any end to confront it. I am really grateful to dramaturg Jim Lewis, my assistant director Niegel Smith, A.J. a veteran of the Afro-Beat ensemble Antibalas, and Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane’s very own Maija Garcia who brilliantly inhabited her role as African dance consultant. Stay tuned to more as this process continues over the next year.
Beautiful Movement/Ugly World showed the company as a generous and ever maturing group of artists and teachers interacting with a diverse group of performers at various stages of development. One of my favorite images of this workshop was in the early stages of its daily class watching as Janet Wong lead the literally wall to wall participants through a stretching, rolling, breathing exercise as Leah Cox or Stuart Singer, Asli Bulbul or Erick Montes and others moved discreetly about the room, offering small corrections, adjustments and encouragements to the participants. This image holds in it the fulfillment of the promise that our company develops artists, thinkers and teachers.
Winter Workshop Participants with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company
On a related note, as I confessed regularly to the participants in the workshop, for whatever reason I found it much easier to move the group to fulsome, thoughtful and dynamic movement - Beautiful Movement - as opposed to whatever I intended months ago when I offered the notion of Ugly World! Was I being too facile when I said with some resignation that the “ugly world” part is always within and without us and that there is no rigid barrier between the sacred work we do called dance and this medium called the outside world? Nonetheless, the atmosphere of seriousness and community was encouraging and prepares us for an upcoming three week long residency at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY (June 3 to 23).
The company’s auditions held at the Trisha Brown Studios last week is a complex memory as well. The 421 women and 78 men there to be scrutinized underline a basic and troubling truth about the dance world. There are so many dreams and, unfortunately and in some cases tragically, they are often unrealized. After the first grueling morning, in the afternoon a young woman returned and asked to speak with me. Her eyes were red from crying and she confessed that having danced some years in a situation she found unfulfilling she was at her wits’ end as to what to do next. As I had just rejected her, could I tell her what was I not seeing or might she be working on? It was a doubly uncomfortable moment: I had seen so many candidates and even with the best intentions on my, Janet and the company’s part to treat each person individually and give them opportunities to show themselves, I could not remember this woman’s movement. This is one of the truths I tried to impart to a group of dance students at the University of IL in Champaign-Urbana. The legendary New York audition “cattle call” is very real and cruel. I do not relish sitting in judgment of other artists, particularly when they are vulnerable and needy of affirmation and, more directly, of a job. Still, that is the role that I am assigned. There is a tendency to head off this inevitability by subjecting young people to the harsh light of the competitiveness and economic realities of the dance-world when they are still young enough to consider other avenues of expression and livelihood. When one crushes the dream of anyone, particularly a young one, one has to take the responsibility for potentially destroying some unpredictable potential or greatness as well.
Blind Date’s first 2007 performance found us making cuts, a privilege though it’s a mystery to me why it takes me so long to see the need to make certain alterations. A good portion of the audience stayed behind for the question and answer session. Some of the more interesting exchanges were actually statements designed as questions. For the first time ever someone commented on the metaphorical meaning of the different squares in Bjorn Amelan’s design implying that there was some reference to territory, national boundaries and the spaces that separate us as people. One young woman gave an impassioned critique of the section wherein Andrea Smith reads a list of natural and man-made disasters since 1995. She said that I/we had failed to once mention Israel, that is “one of the most important conflicts in our world…”
And now onward and a return to Another Evening: I Bow Down with DBR, Wynne Bennett and Regain the Heart Condemned.
-- Bill T. Jones (Tuesday, January 30, 2007)
