Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company: Blind Date
Jan 23, 2006
By
ALLAN ULRICH
allan@voiceofdance.com
Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. Photo by Lois Greenfield.
It is safe to say that the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company has never imported any work to the Bay Area as ambitious as the 2005 Blind Date, given its West Coast premiere Saturday evening (Jan. 21) at UC-Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall, the final event in a two-evening Cal Performances visit. Sheathed in fascinating multi-media trappings, accompanied by live musicians, pervaded with spoken text, yet constantly on the move, the work, which bowed last September at Montclair, New Jersey, is said to have been in preparation since 9/11 and is said, also, to be a portrait of the 21-year-old company.
Running over two hours with a brief, 15-minute intermission, Blind Date, in its exhausting way, strives for an epic quality in its concerns about militarism, patriotism, poverty and individual human rights. Impressive episodes abound during the first hour, yet choreographer and performer Jones hasn't freed his material from either prolixity or self-regard; 90 minutes into Blind Date, you check your watch and wonder where it's all going. This pageant of vital concerns has lost its way. Momentum yields to inertia.
However, thanks to Bjorn G. Amelan's set design, Peter Nigrini's video designs and Robert Wierzel's lighting, the eye is consistently involved. Mobile projection screens dominate the stage in Mondrian-like configurations. Projected upon them are quotations in four languages from the book, The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation, and significant portions of this volume are declaimed by Jones dressed most of the time in a stylish gray suit and by actor Andrea Smith. Photographs of faces flash by and often dancers with solos (Asli Bulbul, Wen-Chung Lin) find themselves performing in counterpoint with their filmed image. Best of all, the electronic trappings and musical excerpts never seem less than central to Jonesthesis (and I am thinking back to Bebe Miller's recent Landing/Place, which drowned in applied and often enigmatic sensory eccentricities). That Jones has resisted ambiguity in his works of late, that he is a master of the craft of communication may have much to do with his popularity with audiences. Everything fits, but not everything compels.
Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. Photo by Lois Greenfield.
The best of Blind Date makes you sit up in your chair because those moments seem to represent unique fusions of word and image and to transcend rhetoric. In a duet with Smith, Jones seems to levitate across his colleague's knees, as they reflect on encroaching militarism, and, in its way, it's just about perfect. So is the episode in which the dancers rush across the stage, one of them exclaims "Me," starts to fall and waits for the others to break the descent; has trust ever been so potently illustrated in dance? A poor black youth is forced to take a job at the fast-food joint, Quack-a-Dack. Liz Prince's costume for him is a real sight and when battered replicas of the duck later float across the stage, they epitomize a scarred, unnecessarily wasted life.
In the second part of Blind Date, when the dancers in tank tops and jeans stop traversing the space in Jonesmilitaristic formations and go into a disco situation, the work feels stretched, even diffuse. Jonessequence on sexual shibboleths, in which a variety of couples and triples, all in underwear, grapple erotically on the floor depends on a flimsy irony: a child-like voice struggles with the reading of relevant passages from Leviticus, struggling over all that biblical diction. Irony, in fact, is a driving force in much of the piece. Jonesranting sermon in the first part almost bludgeons you with its mock sincerity.
The dancers, who apparently contributed to the material, are a splendid collection of contrasting body types and sensibilities. There's tall, elegant Charles Scott who delivers a solo to a movement from a Bach solo violin sonata and later partners close-shaven Leah Cox. There's feral Erick Montes spouting a national anthem and delivering a crab walk, singer Shaneeka Harrell and Maija Garcia, Shayla-Vie Jenkins, Donald C. Shorter, Jr and Stuart Singer.
Choreographer Bill T. Jones. Photo by Lois Greenfield.
At the start of Blind Date, Jones saunters in, smoking a cigarillo and apologizing to us for the habit, goes into a genial little dance. There's elegance here and a measure of virtuosity in the extensions. Jones may be 53, and subject to all sorts of injuries, but he's still a canny performer. Less appealing is the reiterated pleas for cigarettes during the evening. Call it shtick, if you wish, but cuteness is the last quality one ever expected to see from an artist like Jones, whose priorities always seemed directed elsewhere.
All praise is due the musicians'violinists Daniel Bernard Roumain (who also wrote much of the score) and Nurit Pracht, Neel Murgai (sitar, daf, vocals) and Akim 'FunkBuddha. Their contributions were anything but subsidiary.
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