Nothing distorts culture like a culture war. Bill T. Jones’s “Still/Here” was the most controversy-generating dance work of the 1990s, but watching a 30th anniversary revival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Wednesday was a bit like watching Toto draw back the curtain. “Still/Here” is just a dance: a sophisticated, good-looking dance — but one that, removed from the context of its origin and reception, is surprisingly ordinary.
“Still/Here” grew out of so-called survivor workshops that Jones, who was known to be H.I.V. positive, led with volunteers who had faced or were facing life-threatening illnesses. He incorporated movements, sound and video from these workshops into a two-hour piece performed by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company in 1994. (Zane had died of AIDS in 1988.)
Arlene Croce, the dance critic of The New Yorker, refused to see the work but wrote about it anyway, decrying it (and Jones) as a particularly coercive example of what she labeled victim art. Then came a battle of responses by major cultural figures in opinion essays and letters to the editor.
The revival of “Still/Here” retains the original video design, by Gretchen Bender, which features the faces and voices of the original volunteers and a 42-year-old Jones. The cast is all new, half its members too young to have been alive in 1994. The work starts with a glossary, as the dancers sequentially recite the name of a volunteer and act out the self-identifying movement phrase that person improvised. These phrases are understandably humble and hokey; Jones uses all his formal skills to try to transmute them into transcendent art. He never quite succeeds.
As the controversy obscured, “Still/Here” is full of athletic, often beautiful dance. The young, agile performers run back and forth in tidal patterns and interpenetrating formations. They leap, lean, struggle and collapse. They hold one another up, sometimes overhead. They cross their legs in balletic fifth position and jump-kick, as in martial arts. In one motif, they balance heroically on one leg, with the other leg and their torsos extended on perpendicular plane.
When we hear a volunteer respond to Jones’s prompt to recall the moment of her diagnosis, the dancers don’t exactly act out the moment. Similar scenes (“now imagine your death”) are abstracted — formalized with doubling and tripling by other dancers. But some of the choreography, like a section about breast cancer, is too on-the-nose, and much of the rest still feels like a fancy version of the trust-fall exercises we see the volunteers doing.
In the first half, the volunteers’ words are converted into art songs composed by Kenneth Frazelle and sung by Odetta. Her powerful (recorded) voice gives the work some majesty and heft, especially when she breaks unaccompanied into the spiritual “You May Run On.” But Frazelle’s string quartet music occasionally dips into the maudlin, and neither it nor Jones’s choreography can match the force of Odetta’s words: “I assaulted God. The next morning, He was in me.”
After intermission, Frazelle’s score is swapped out for a livelier one by Vernon Reid, of Living Colour. Reid mixes in sounds of murmuring, crumpling paper and a drill. On Wednesday, when he made a cameo, his climactic guitar solo gave the dance a lift.
But while the second part is also distinguished by changes in Liz Prince’s costumes, now red, and in the expressive colors of Robert Wierzel’s expert lighting, it isn’t different enough from the first. Jones has written that the first half is about reacting to a diagnosis, while the second is about living with it, yet the dichotomy isn’t that clear. After intermission we hear more about survival, winning and hope, but the reprisal of material makes the section feel like an overlong coda or second ending to an under-edited work.
The new cast members do their best, though at a great distance. When the excellent Barrington Hinds dances while talking about the death of his mother, he isn’t Lawrence Goldhuber, who in the original was talking about the death of his actual mother. And when he speaks of being inured to friends dying, he isn’t saying that during the AIDS crisis.
I’m sure many people will disagree with my judgment here. It’s hard to imagine, however, a fight like the first one, which wasn’t really about this dance. Some questions remain about the potentially exploitative inclusion of the volunteers, and whether those questions are cleared away by the metaphor of dancers as the spirit of survival. According to the company, only one of those volunteers is still alive; though, yes, they all live, in the immortality-of-art sense, in the show.
Jones lives in that sense, too, but also as the man who raised a triumphant fist during the bows on Wednesday. In its ambitions and execution, “Still/Here” reads fundamentally as something he needed to do for himself, as a famous, grieving man with a potentially fatal condition, learning how to go on. He’s been living and continuing to make dances for the past 30 years. In that way, “Still/Here” succeeded.
The post Review: After 30 Years, a Controversial Dance Is Just a Dance appeared first on New York Times.
