The Long Day’s Journey
of Bill T. Jones
Come from a family of migrant farm workers, Bill T. Jones knows in his bones what it means to make a journey. Nearly a quarter of a century ago, the young choreographer signed a pact with himself, agreeing, as he recalls in his autobiography, "to go on a long journey equipped with nothing more than my body and this hunger." Since then, Jones has spent his artistic life investigating the formal and expressive possibilities of people moving from here to there. And with the Kennedy Center premiere of We Set Out Early . . . Visibility Was Poor, Jones addresses dance and life as mutually metaphorical journeys.
The relationship between art and life has preoccupied twentieth-century artists since Marcel Duchamp, whose readymade sculptures revealed the conventional boundary between art and life as a line drawn only in sand. Jones, inspired by Duchamp, as well as by postmodern choreographers, structuralist filmmakers, performance artists, African-American music and literature, and his early family life, has traversed one of the most challenging transitions of this century: from '70s postmodernism to '90s identity politics. Is it enough, today, to continue making art randomly generated by appropriation and juxtaposition? Or should artists assert a social agenda? Are these two positions mutually exclusive?
Unlike his modernist forebears, who steadfastly developed their early discoveries (Martha Graham’s expressionism; Merce Cunningham’s chance aesthetic; George Balanchine’s formalism), Jones has never settled upon a single technique or credo. Throughout his odyssey, from a bohemian counterculture existence in upstate New York in the '70s, to the hip spectacle of Downtown Manhattan in the '80s, to an international touring schedule in the '90s, Jones has remained alive to new ways of approaching fundamental questions about movement, art, identity, and culture.
Jones’s early experiments, with his late partner and collaborator Arnie Zane, emphasized pure movement over story or expression, but the couple soon discovered that, despite their rigorous formal concerns, audiences perceived in the work powerful meanings, both personal and political. "Resonant abstraction," as Jones calls it, eventually gave way, when Zane died of AIDS in 1988, to Jones’s desire "to take a stand." The evening-length Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land (1990), for example, moved from a deconstruction of the eponymous slave narrative to a utopian landscape of social harmony.
Over the years, Jones has embraced both anger and faith; seduction and alienation; the cool distance of the virtuoso and the impassioned plea of the preacher. He has been led sometimes by movement, and at other times by politics; he has both emphasized and erased social difference. The impetus has been personal, or conceptual, or political, or hyperphysical, or all of the above. In his current quest for the meaning of art and community in the face of death, each question, provisionally answered, produces another. Jones’s unflinching willingness to adjust his course, in response to shifts in internal desire and external circumstances, makes for work uncommonly wise, if not infallible.
For Still/Here (1993), an evening-length dance based on material gathered from workshops with survivors of life-threatening illnesses, Jones had considered disbanding his company in favor of HIV-positive performers from around the country. In the end, however, video portraits and voiceovers of the real-life survivors shared the stage with the professional performers. With We Set Out Early . . . Visibility Was Poor, Jones comes full circle in his thinking. The dancers are not merely metaphorical stand-ins for other people, real or imagined; the dancers themselves, and their process of inhabiting the dance, are the stuff of the journey.
Once again, Jones is composing his dance according to strict formal parameters such as space, density, texture, and musicality. "The story," he explains, "is in the body performing the sequences of movement. The journey is how the movement material comes into the world, how it goes into the dancers’ bodies, and what it means when it is set afire in the performance space."
The musical journey of We Set Out Early . . . Visibility Was Poor echoes Jones’s renewed enthusiasm for the transformative potential of art, despite the loss of faith he feels surrounding him. The dance begins at century’s curtain-raising, with Igor Stravinsky’s 1917 "L’Histoire Du Soldat," and ends with the approaching millennium, with Peteris Vasks’s "Stimmen" (meaning "voices"). For Jones, this contrast between the early modernist’s exuberant self-confidence—in the midst of world war—and the contemporary Latvian composer’s heart-rending plea for healing maps a significant change.
"I don’t think that artists today believe that art can change the world or tell the truth. How did we get from Stravinsky’s youthful idealism to this spiritual fatigue? For me, as a man in his mid-40s, whose generation has been decimated by AIDS, there are a lot of parallels and questions in this journey."
In the age of AIDS—and Jones himself is HIV-positive—the very notion of a "journey," by nature a forward-pressing movement, becomes an existential challenge. How to prevent the journey from narrowing to an exodus? How to embark without the illusion of boundless time—in other words, with such poor visibility?
We Set Out Early . . . Visibility Was Poor has returned Jones to his formalist roots ("It’s old, but it’s fresh"), a radical departure from the rhetorically-motivated Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land and Still/Here. "Once you’ve named names, once you’ve pointed to something and expressed how you feel about it," Jones explains his turn-around, "you either leave the poetic world or dive back into the mystery." He chose to dive.
"I have re-committed to dance. It’s not anthropology. It’s not literature. It’s not sign language. If we let it, dance can surprise us again and again. Just when I thought I lost interest in everything, some movement shocks me and intrigues me. It leads me to 'what if . . .' That’s where I’m at right now."