Journeys

Bill T. Jones dances with the Devil

by Marcia B. Siegel

WE SET OUT EARLY . . . VISIBILITY WAS POOR, Choreography by Bill T. Jones. Costumes by Liz Prince. Lighting by Robert Wierzel. Set design by Bjorn Amelan. Music by Igor Stravinsky, John Cage, and Peteris Vask. Presented by Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company at the Emerson Majestic Theatre through June 6.

Igor Stravinsky's opera without song, L'histoire du soldat, ends with a spoken chorale that warns us we can't be both what we are and what we were. Music from L'histoire accompanies the first part of Bill T. Jones's long, three-part work We Set Out Early . . . Visibility Was Poor. Jones discarded the story of the soldier who makes a fatal deal with the Devil, but the solo he did on opening night (a kind of prologue, to a Beethoven string quartet) seemed to have taken the lesson to heart.

This "Etude" might be a sketch for the movement in the larger work. In a series of seemingly unrelated moves, like an eccentric barre exercise, he shifts his ribcage, splays a leg to the side, angles one arm and then the other a different way. Some moves are solidly of a piece; others droop or ripple through the joints. He makes sudden fast changes of direction or foot beats; he streaks across the space to a new standing spot. He seems to be working hard for precision and facility, even when he appears casual. Now in his mid 40s, Jones isn't the dancer he was, but he sure is the dancer he is. He knows it. He seems okay with it.

The big dance that follows the solo is like a reflection of the lifetimes of 10 dancers moving across the surface of time and disappearing without leaving anyone sadder or happier. The piece is dadaistic, not at all literal, but very specific and deliberate. It may mean nothing, or anything, or everything.

The Stravinsky section, "On the TSII," opens the work. A crowd in individualistic costumes (by Liz Prince) pass through in no particular order, stopping for a while to encounter others, then leaving. There are seductive duets, playful dance games. People pause at a barre to do odd stretchings and lunges. People stand and watch other people dancing. The movement is often based on ballet steps, but they're slanted or finished off the wrong way, which is interesting enough to start seeming right.

This entire part has a circus atmosphere that's largely established by Stravinsky in his dissonant, popular mode. Jones's choreography falls in with the bouncy if skeptical good spirits. Robert Wierzel's lighting, throughout the evening, changes the mood almost arbitrarily. One minute dancers are smiling in floods of light, the next minute they're shadowy forms picked out of the dark by thin bright side beams. The musical sections often end as one dancer -- no one in particular -- continues moving in a flickering downspot and the others recede into darkness. With the jolt of a sudden film cut, the backdrop glares bright pink, or a black curtain slowly descends to cut off the sky.

All these techniques -- the academic movement, the stark scenic devices that create a semblance of narrative, the determined unrelatedness of one thing to another, and the confidence that all this unrelatedness makes its own kind of sense -- have been employed by Merce Cunningham under the tutelage of John Cage for 50 years. Bill T. Jones acknowledges this relationship by using Cage's music for the second part, "Cape Bardo."

With a sepulchral voice, probably Cage's, intoning words we can't understand, a dancer stands alone at the barre in a somber space. Two ghostly forms cross hesitantly in the background. Other people slowly take apart a metal geometric form (by Bjorn Amelan) and put it back together in the shape of a wagon. A toy piano plinks out notes. The group shifts with the wagon to the other side of the space. The man alone stretches and pivots.

In the third part, "Voiceland," the solo man becomes a sort of Everyman who emerges from a group of women. They chatter silently and he walks forward, looks back at them, looks down at his hand raised against his chest. The group floats from one sociable interlude to another. A tense chordal score by the contemporary Latvian composer Peteris Vask piles climax onto screeching climax, and the group finishes, disperses, regroups again, and again.

The man merges back into the changing group from time to time; he dances with a woman, but then he's alone again. Another man, who's been leading the group in a chattering, boogeying dance, stands behind the Everyman, grinning. Maybe he's the Devil. At the end of the dance, the Everyman is looking down at his hand, and the Devil is reaching out for his shoulder.

The performance reviewed above took place after the Phoenix Arts section had gone to press.