by Leigh Witchel
Thirty years later, Bill T. Jones’ Still/Here returned to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where it was first performed. It feels as if the most salient part of the preceding sentence is “thirty years later.” More than feeling the event, we marked time’s process of changing the urgent present into the contemplation of history.
Still/Here is in two parts, Still and Here, not separated by a slash, but an intermission. To open, five men and five women were standing, arrayed onstage to big music by Kenneth Frazelle. The score recited clipped statements: a name, then a sentence, illustrative of a person.
Floyd: I like jazz.
Robert: I’m resigned.
Sometimes the sentence would be illustrated with movement.
Beverly: I’m a fighter.
And the dancer clenched her fists and struck a pose, almost like Krishna in bharatanatyam.
The movement was simple in the first part: running and walking patterns, with gendered-ish casting, as in one tableau of two groups, four of one gender and one of another. More often, Jones paired up the dancers, but gender wasn’t pivotal. One of the things Still/Here did more clearly than some of the other major dance works about AIDS, such as Neil Greenberg’s trilogy (Not-About-AIDS-Dance, The Disco Project and Part Three Trilogy) or Ishmael Houston-Jones’ THEM, was put forward poignantly that AIDS was not just a crisis for gay men.
There was a long, slow threnody with the dancers changing position. The section ended with a man stepping backwards into the dark.
Gretchen Bender’s visual and media designs featured illusions of a growing frame and other fascinating tricks of perspective. One man danced in front of the scrim, another behind while a face stared at us. In a bow to the nineties, a woman did the Roger Rabbit.
Jones mentioned in his program notes “The piece is and is not that work from 1994.” We saw a metaphor for this when a martial solo on screen was echoed by a dancer watching it. It was an impossible task: the filmed image was manipulated and on loop.
A film clip of Jones interviewing one of the original workshop participants about when she learned that she was HIV positive was the most telling section. She tersely recounted the moment, and her impatience to know. “Yes or no? But I really knew.” Then that was sung and acted in a double duet.
That was also the weakest section. Jones was a pushy interviewer. At a moment where the best thing to do would have been to listen, he interrupted constantly asking details, as if more interested in what he could make of her story. If there was any fuel for the criticism that Jones was exploiting people, the hints of it were there.
He needed these people. Their voices and quotes, “Slash, poison or burn? These are your choices,” or “A part of me is gone” were integral to the work. Though the piece had plenty of movement, it was difficult to watch, or yes, assess the first half as a dance. A screen showed examination photos as the women used their hands to cover one breast and their vaginas.
The strongest achievement of Still/Here was the clarity with which it connected the universality of loss, and how it refused to compartmentalize AIDS. On a recording, we heard company alumni Lawrence Goldhuber talking about the slow death of his mother from cancer, and how he was prepared for it. “. . . I can go on pretending like it’s normal because it’s become normal.”
The next section, a double adagio with pairs of dancers replacing other rumbled into the tallest man dancing in front lit by a hand held torch. The rest of the cast manipulated him in the half light. And then a striking quote, Jones used the same hymn You May Run On from the finale of Alvin Ailey’s Revelations.
A man ran with the flashlight, which was briefly turned towards us when Jones showed his hand on why he used the hymn: “I assaulted God.” Ailey died of AIDS in 1989, asking, in order to spare his mother the stigma of AIDS, that the cause of death be announced as terminal blood dyscrasia. The strings climbed as the dancers regrouped, getting into line, with one man going to the front before they cast tilted out of the line into a tableau as the score sang “still here.”
The piece was long and that felt like a good end, but it was an intermission.
In the first part, Still, the movement wasn’t a structure but a framework. The second part, Here, much like Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, came largely after the finish of the narrative and was a 45-minute distillation of the themes in dance. But you could have, and might have preferred, to watch either part alone.
Several columns were placed at the back, the leggings were stripped, and the lights by Robert Wierzel were hazy. We heard voices as the score in this section composed by Vernon Reid. Only a few things could be made out at first, including counting. The dancers, now in shades of red, made walking and running patterns, with a few standing or lounging at the back between five columns. Then the cast formed a circle, running like a playground game, which became a diagonal with solos breaking out.
“Everyone is connected to somebody.” Jones envisioned this cast as a community, holding hands and forming lines or stars. A woman’s voice, challenged, “Tell me how to fight this disease because I am going to win,” then the group rocked one man into darkness. The screens came down, with pictures of beating hearts as the dancers walked behind casting shadows.
There wasn’t much extraneous in Still/Here. Another woman spoke about trying to be superwoman, but winding up in and out of the hospital as a woman onstage was manipulated by two men. The dance said what the film said what the music said, but when Jones was working with dance as well as stage pictures in the second half, the piece became thicker.
A dance with three trios with a solo man at the side led to a long section in unison. Themes and material, including the final tableau, returned from the first act. One man slowly balanced heading back as the others ran across, then others joined the line, also balancing as they traveled, walking into the blue.
A man brought a television in, with Jones on it, speaking from the workshops that formed the basis of the piece. The dancers went back to a diagonal, and moved into a circle of increasing frenzy as the lights dimmed. The curtain closed on the question “When I cross over what happens then?”
Rather than in isolation, it’s more illuminating to look at Still/Here as part of a corpus of dance about AIDS. Greenberg’s trilogy and THEM have already been mentioned. In ballet, the relationship was far less direct. Gerald Arpino’s Round of Angels was a memorial that kept its distance from the subject, Concerto Six Twenty-Two by Lar Lubovitch was more open, celebrating the support and courage of couples affected by the disease.
No matter the quality of the trilogy or THEM, both lost impact as they went from the urgency of current events to historical ones. Both those works affected me more than Still/Here. In contrast to the honesty Greenberg had in his autobiographical obsessiveness, or the transgressive sexuality in THEM, the curation of other people’s stories, the careful craftsmanship and joinery of Jones’ work felt very “well-made.” Sometimes a bit too much, like the best student in composition class. But had I seen the work at its origin, or even the ten or twenty year mark rather than three decades on, I might not have sensed that cool distance.
The question of Victim Art, which caused such a ruckus back when the piece was first done, doesn’t have a simple answer. There’s more to creation than good or bad; there’s a complex symbiosis. In making a dance out of their stories, was Jones using people living with AIDS or giving them a voice?
Yes.
copyright © 2024 by Leigh Witchel
Still/Here – Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, Brooklyn, NY
November 1, 2024
Cover: Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company in Still/Here. Photo © Nir Arieli.
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