Voice Lessons
When I pause to recollect Bill T. Jones, it’s not only his gleaming face and spring-loaded dancing that I see. His voice, too, appears—deep, sonorous, and cadenced, each sentence a present, shaped neatly with a ribbon. Sometimes hushed, sometimes pointed, his voice rolls along like the weather, intensifying and dissipating with seductive force.
In dance, Jones (featured in Time, profiled by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in the New Yorker) has become the voice of our era. It’s a time, since the mid-1980’s, when artists have grappled with the diminished capacity of modernism; when African-Americans and other marginalized communities have claimed unprecedented visibility in the mainstream of arts and culture; when gay rights gained ground, and AIDS became a household word. The line between art and politics smudged, and faded.
A dubious distinction, no doubt, for an artist to be considered a spokesman. In good measure, Jones was an unwitting candidate, in the right place at the right (or wrong) time. Early on, there was his artistic and personal partnership with Arnie Zane, which was seized upon eagerly as an emblem of the politics of difference. Then a few years ago there was New Yorker critic Arlene Croce’s formalist manifesto against "victim art," which used Jones’s Still/Here (1994), sight unseen, as target practice. But his position as our exemplary agent provocateur also follows from the fact that he dares to speak beyond the cloistered conversation of "Art."
Jones knows full-well that he’s mouthy. (Would he be considered less harshly if he weren’t a dancer, an African-American, a gay man—all categories traditionally consigned to silence?) And he has managed to stick his foot in it on more than one occasion. Perhaps that’s the risk of promiscuous eloquence.
The reach of his life’s work remains extraordinary. For Jones, art is about social relations, whether or not it is about social issues. His structuralist duets with Zane, for instance, commented on race relations without ever addressing the subject. By choosing a motley group of dancers for his company, he told us something about how different bodies can find a way to work and play together.
Yet he spoke explicitly as a descendant of slaves in Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land (1990), and he recuperated his "outing" as an HIV positive man by creating Still/Here. In both cases, Jones attempted to redeem the brutish violence of mortals and mortality by making room for faith. In How To Walk an Elephant (1986), he and Zane played with the conventions of classical ballet, and made a gender-bending critique in the process. Even an entertaining romp like Secret Pastures (1985) remarked on the oppressive Third World implications of conspicuous consumption. But, of course, the body has its own language. We Set Out Early . . . Visibility Was Poor (1997) evoked a sense of communal journey, through what’s long been metaphorized as "the poetry of motion."
A voice can resound and echo. It lifts up. Rings out. Gets thrown. It is not easy to find, and too infrequently claimed. Ambrose Bierce defined fallibility as being "mistaken at the top of one’s voice."
Jones’s voice is not a voice of reason. It’s more the emotional prosody of the preacher-man, who, as a child, he was predicted to become. With each dance, Jones calls out, hoping to hear back an "Amen." An approving response, an act of community.
When the soul takes flight, speech becomes song. Increasingly, Jones is turning to song to invoke spirit and community. He has been preparing a solo program for himself, in which he will sing as well as dance. (It’s a time-honored profession, the song-and-dance man—James Brown, Bojangles, Sammy Davis, Jr.) In one solo, Jones dances an angular, side-sidling Suzie Q as he sings an old Texas prison song:
"Where have you been, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?
Where have you been, John Billy?
I’ve taken me a wife
She’s the jolly of my life
She’s a young girl who cannot leave her mother."
The blues, these old folk tunes, they are instruments of ancestral memory. They deliver him comfort. Singing them, Jones is a griot — the tribal storyteller — giving voice to the voiceless of history. Each one, he says, is like "a little window that opens up in time and space. I’m able to go through the air to people who are long dead."
Jones generates movement by improvising to music, but also in silence, because there’s music in those joints and muscles. His dance vocabulary is highly gestural. And isn’t gesture another way of giving voice to the body’s memory? In Still/Here, Jones collected material by asking survivors of terminal illness to tell their stories in gesture as well as in words, which in the final work invoke the presence of those individuals who have since passed on.
Use of the speaking voice goes back to the beginning of Jones’s career, when he and Zane added dialogue to their duets, such as Rotary Action (1982):
"A Make a speech.
"B Make a statement.
"A OK, it’s my turn to begin.
"B Let me introduce you.
"A Waiting . . ."
In Jones’s solos during those early years, he seduced and confronted his spectators, as he verbally wooed and accused them. Since then, Jones has refined his coloratura: he’s been angry, ecstatic, defiant, hopeful, outraged, and mournful. But never timid, or tentative.
I asked Jones: As an artist, what have you learned about developing your voice? He broke out into song and fell silent just as abruptly, cocking his head and softening his eyes. "I sing, and then I listen. I sing again, and listen a little more."