THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 30, 1995 TAG: 9507280063
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E10 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Dance review
SOURCE: MARK MOBLEY
LENGTH: Medium: 73 lines
TEN DAYS AGO, I did something the esteemed dance critic of The New Yorker refused to do. I went to see the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane dance company in Jones' ``Still/Here.''
The company closed the American Dance Festival in Durham, N.C., with this two-hour-plus work, which has been touring the country since its premiere in Lyon, France, in September. The piece has been controversial for its use of filmed interviews with and movement by terminally ill people, projected on video screens and replicated in the taped music and choreog-raphy.
Arlene Croce of The New Yorker sparked a debate with an article about why she would not review ``Still/-Here.'' Victim art, she called it: ``When a victim artist finds his or her public, a perfect, mutually manipulative union is formed which no critic may put asunder,'' she wrote.
Viewing the controversy from a distance, I thought Croce was wrong to dismiss the piece without seeing it, though - I'm sure she knew this - her tactic gave her arguments more spark than a run-of-the-mill bad review would have.
As it turns out, Croce was right. I must state upfront that I am not a dance critic, dancer or choreographer, just a dance fan. Yet on the basis of its staging, content, text, music and use of gesture to illustrate specific autobiographical episodes, ``Still/Here'' was a laborious spectacle of little emotional depth.
Jones appeared with his company in Virginia Beach to open the 1993-94 Tidewater Performing Arts Society season. He is himself HIV positive and an AIDS widower. Four years after the 1988 death of his partner Zane, Jones conducted 11 ``survival workshops'' across the country, during which he talked and danced with dying people.
Jones' tragic error was assuming that merely projecting pictures of these people - and himself, but more about that in a bit - would give his piece weight. Instead, he produced a work of forced solemnity. After the screens came down and the 20th or 30th unidentified, artfully shot face floated into focus, the show had the slick sentimentality of an Oscar-night tribute.
The ``visual concept and media environment'' designed by Gretchen Bender gave the work a distinctly '80s feel. A couple of her designs, such as a row of five blue screens, each with a beating red heart drawing, were memorable. But a rat-a-tat sequence of slides of tumors exemplified the skimmed emotional surface of the work. (For a truly sincere and powerful treatment of similar material, rent ``Time Indefinite,'' an autobiographical video by Ross McElwee, maker of ``Sherman's March.'' It's in another league.)
The long first act included North Carolina composer Kenneth Frazelle's songs for the Lark Quartet and Odetta. The opening slow movement was a perfect fusion of and advancement from the music of Copland and Barber. But these pieces should have been performed live, not on tape. For his own taped music, former Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid layered speech in an attractive fabric of guitar drones.
There were bright spots. One was the supple dancing of the remarkable Arthur Aviles. Another was a happy surprise about a half-hour into the piece, a video clip of a presumably terminally ill person turning a cartwheel. Perhaps these will be seen in Bill Moyers' PBS special on ``Still/Here,'' to be aired sometime in the fall.
But the final image of the work was the company dancing in a circle around a television spinning on casters. On the TV, the face of Jones, who didn't dance in the piece. Jones was on the cover of Time magazine last year. It seems that wasn't enough. MEMO: Send your calendar notices to Roy A. Bahls, The Virginian-Pilot and The
Ledger-Star, 150 W. Brambleton Ave., Norfolk, Va. 23510. Fax 446-2963.
Include description of event, admission charge, time, date, location and
phone. Deadline is 10 days before publication. Call Mark Mobley at
446-2783, write to the above address or send electronic mail to
mobley(AT)infi.net. by CNB