Heroics

Bill T. Jones takes a breather

by Marcia B. Siegel

Bill T. Jones's one-man show looks a lot like the performances he used to give 20 years ago in the lofts of SoHo. Spiffier, more assured perhaps, but there was the same invincible presence of Jones himself, tilting us from shock to shame to pleasure with a stream of non sequiturs that attained only an ephemeral coherence. His dance still identifies with the postmodern sensibility of the '60s and '70s -- intellectual, eclectic, anti-virtuosic, often fragmentary and resistant to the sense-making devices of ordinary choreography.

Without charismatic performers (I'm thinking of Trisha Brown, David Gordon, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer), postmodernism might have fallen flat once its rebellious moment was past. Jones had star quality from the beginning. He could sing and tell stories as well as dance, sometimes simultaneously. He could look the audience in the eye and make it believe anything he told it. He could tap into his mental process and say whatever popped into his head, not pausing to edit out offensive content.

The Breathing Show, at the Emerson Majestic last weekend, is really a showcase for a diva -- a Jessye Norman or an Isadora Duncan. What's on display is Jones and his many talents, surrounded by films, a live violinist/composer (Daniel Roumain), and an elegant scenic environment to make thematic connections.

Totally at ease, Jones starts dancing to recorded Schubert songs. He interrupts them to talk to the audience about the music. Schubert makes him think about romanticism -- then zoom to the Austrian mountains, the birth of Nazism, and a string of other associations. He seems surprised that "Bill T. Jones has come out as a romantic in 2000." He sings, "Go tell Aunt Rodie, the old gray goose is dead." He resumes the Schubert. A phrase or two of stepping in place and a smart salute suggest militarism, but most of the dancing looks like found movement, with no literal reference.

Jones's dance often looks improvised but I suspect it isn't. It's so specifically focused, so carved out, so precise in its phrasing and even its hesitations. In one piece, Gardening, when violinist Roumain crossed the stage with him, scraping at long notes or unexpected, toneless rhythms, they might not have been altogether sure of the outcome.

The film Ghostcatching, by Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar, revealed the ectoplasmic lines of Jones's movement. Kaiser and Eshkar have developed the technique of motion capture, which can feed movement data from a live dancer into a computer. There it can be digitized and manipulated like any animation. Sketchy figures danced a phrase Jones had already shown us. They left traces behind them and receded into the meshes of their own physicality. Sometime later Jones backed off the stage saying, "Just when our hearts understand it, our eyes must gently let it go."

The Breathing Show was very artful. It wasn't just the Schubert that made it so, or the soft drapes and hanging sculpture made of silver flakes (by Björn Amelan). Or the film by Abraham Ravett that fixed on certain objects in a garden, for so long that you began to notice minute movements of the light, the air. Or the surrealistic touches: the lines from Gertrude Stein; the appearance of an attendant (Amelan) who put a bench in place and offered Jones a balloon, which he burst with a pin as soon as Jones had blown it up. Or the scraggly, stooped Roumain, wandering through the space and playing his one wailing note.

I liked seeing Jones in good form, so comfortable and adoringly received by the audience. ("He's my hero," said Dance Umbrella director Jeremy Alliger in his introduction, and what could an audience do after that?) But Jones seemed unusually mellow. He'd take aim at a target -- the Nazis, slavery -- but drop the subject before nailing it. He still connects his dance with meditative and spiritual practice, and in Floating the Tongue he invited the audience to try an exercise he's used to relieve tension and open up creative channels.

Maybe he's taking a break from the political and emotional turmoil that drove his work during most of the '90s. The Breathing Show certainly celebrates his current status as a pop icon. Only last week I saw Herb Ritts's photo of a naked Bill T. in mid jump, as an ad for the New York Times, backlit on a kiosk at Logan Airport, and decorating the side of a building in 42nd Street. I guess I like him better when he finds the snakes in the bouquet.