Mr. Jones and Me (and You)
The New York Times Magazine recently featured Bill T. Jones, a dancer and choreographer whose works span decades. The occasion is a new trio of evening-length works. The interview touches on Jones’ aesthetic evolution, his personal life, and his integration of political histories into dance. It conveys a lifelong seriousness about Jones.
It is not a burdened quality, exactly. (Though a burdened quality would be utterly fine for a black, gay, HIV+ dancer in America, whose partner and company co-namesake died of complications from AIDS just before the National Endowment for the Arts suffered a financial stranglehold in the interest of censorship.) It is more like a serene awareness of what came before, and what might come next if we don’t commit our work to humanity.
During a Q. and A. with Jones and his company, the moderator asked a question about what it takes for someone... to stand up and resist, and whether a piece like this can inspire people to act. Jones took the question seriously. “I am making this work to satisfy my artistic desires,” he said, “but behind it I’m also trying to make a work that might be like in the black church, when somebody stands up and says: ‘Yes! I have a problem!’ They say it to the community.”
Last night I had the privilege of seeing Analogy/Lance, the second in the aforementioned trio of dances. (Full disclosure: my partner is currently employed by the American Dance Festival, which commissioned the work.) Long slopes of Marley dance flooring were rigged to act both as backdrop and stage.
On it, the dancers immediately demonstrated the precision of their ensemble. They crossed the flooring, one behind the next, synchronized to the point of seeming identical. (When each dancer later explored their unique style, it was pleasing to know that they could imitate each other.) They took to microphones to voice a conversation, fragmented and spanning many months, between Jones and his nephew, the eponymous Lance. The story is one of potential eaten up by social forces. Lance’s young life includes dance lessons, and in a surprising moment of heartache, a reference to his “white uncle,” Arnie. (The aforementioned Arnie Zane died of complications from AIDS in 1988. His name remains in the company: Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane.) Lance tells of taking up prostitution and drug use, and eventually serves time in prison. The dancers portray him, his predators, his customers, his lovers, and his time in the club scene. It is not all tragic: there are successes, and there is confidence, and there is a drag alter-ego named Pretty. But the conversations with his uncle are held via phone, from a medical facility, paralyzed and awaiting diagnosis.
There is orneriness and pride in the way that Lance tells his story. This sometimes leads, audibly, to Jones becoming annoyed with his nephew. But in a life with even a handful of different circumstances, those qualities would have led the obviously talented Lance to considerable success. That is perhaps the most heartbreaking aspect of Analogy/Lance. If Jones is offering up a problem to the community, it is not just one man’s tragedy. It is the slender eggshells that make up marginalized groups’ room for error. Between childhood ballet (with “so many white people!”) and telling his story to his Uncle, there are infinite points where Lance is failed: by family, by community, by law enforcement, and by a country that offers harrowing consequences to black men who do not behave within narrow parameters.
After the performance, I kept thinking of last week’s BET Awards - an event that gets considerably more press than American Dance Festival. The musicians Beyonce and Kendrick Lamar, with a different set of incredible dancers, performed “Freedom.” Dancers kicked up liquid flames and visually punctuated a song that demands what it is called. It’s a show-stopping feat of choreography, music, and technical theater, and brings me back to Jones’ point in the Times: art can serve one’s personal creative impetus, but still present to the community the needs, demands, and problems being suffered by the artist.
As we left the Durham Performing Arts Center, we encountered a man in a wheelchair near the back of the room. I smiled at him, and later learned that he was, as I suspected, Lance. He is alive, and just as exuberant as Analogy/Lance insists. He beamed as brightly from the back of the room as his uncle did from the curtain call.
Since 2004, Jones has been awarded a MacArthur genius grant, Bessies, honorary doctorates, two Tony Awards, Kennedy Center Honors, a National Medal of the Arts, and more. I cannot help but wonder what Lance might have won at the BET Awards, had the impossible world not intervened.
Decades have passed since the height of the AIDS epidemic. The opioid crisis is changing America’s outlook on drug law. Social media has given a public platform to those who might never have had one before. And luckily - very, very luckily - there are men like Lance, still here to remind us that it was not always so. They have persevered; they command our attention. If we are wise, we give it to them. Again in the Times:
Jones gave me a sense of what it meant when he took his first steps onto those first stages, in the 1970s. His dances were designed to get the audience — almost completely white, then as now — to examine what they were doing, sitting there, watching an aggressively beautiful, half-naked, young, gay, out black man dance for them. It was, absolutely, an intimidation.
Though the audience has somewhat diversified since, the intimidation remains. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a white, female dancer with long hair tied into a knot performs as proxy for Lance near the end of the evening: deft footwork, then shaking with seizure. Do we see Lance in her? Do we see ourselves in Lance? The questions keep coming, and if we are lucky, they won’t stop any time soon.
For more about Bill T. Jones, I suggest this old but excellent interview. For more about the dance itself - which I watched without pen and paper, and do little justice here - find reviews! Keep arts criticism alive for the media we can’t carry in our pockets. Finally, for some context of Jones’ history with illness and dance, read about Still/Here. Arlene Croce may be an old-school, ballet-centric dance critic, but I don’t think she was wrong to draw a line between life and art. The fallout still seems to resonate even now.
