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All dance all the time
Bill T. Jones and the Orion String Quartet at the Shubert
BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL

A dancer’s idea of Heaven might be to dance nonstop, 24 hours a day, with live musicians playing and nobody watching except your friends. This is pretty much what the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company looked like when it appeared last weekend at the Shubert Theatre as part of the FleetBoston Celebrity Series/Wang Center Dance Series. The three pieces on the program, all from 2002, were true-blue, all-dance works, without the talking, texts, or props that often steered us through Jones’s dense movement essays in the past. By the time the first piece was two minutes old, I felt almost overwhelmed.

Jones seems to be going through a particularly inventive period, and his 10 company members are relishing every challenge he throws at them. Given that the Orion String Quartet played for every dance, we might have expected to see choreography that was " musical " in some recognizable, readable way — think Mark Morris. But Bill T. Jones doesn’t offer us that kind of literalism.

The relationship between contemporary dance and music is particularly tricky and interesting right now. As disciples of the Cage/Cunningham æsthetic that decreed the two forms could inhabit the same stage but weren’t to influence or depend on each other, dancers learned to approach music at some remove. Classical music was not just old hat, it had imposed its own form and emotionality on the traditions of ballet and modern dance that the avant-garde rejected. Since the ’60s, we’ve seen acres of dance accompanied by every kind of popular music, folk music, ambient sounds, words, electronics, silence, and, once in a while, classical music doing its own thing unattended.

But now, both dance and classical music are looking for new audiences, and a lot of high- and low-profile hook-ups have been engineered. Trisha Brown’s remarkable staging of the Schubert Winterreise with baritone Simon Keenlyside in the Lincoln Center Great Performers series is just one recent example. Bill T. Jones first encountered the Orion String Quartet in 1998, when he made a solo for a benefit concert. He used the slow movement of the Beethoven Opus 135, and he performed the piece in Boston the same year, under the title Étude. That solo became the germ of the company dance he’s now set to the whole quartet, Verbum. The match with the Orion " took, " and an intricate partnership was formed. The Orion is the resident quartet of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, which became the institutional half of the collaboration. Out of the mix came the three new choreographies we saw last weekend.

In all three, if the dance was following the shape of the music, those workings were more subtle than I could see at first view. The dances reflected the musical moods, and there were intersections at points of tension, climax, resolution, rhythm. Jones’s musical approach occupied a sort of middle ground between dancing to the music in a Balanchinean sense and casually co-existing with it in the Zen of Merce Cunningham. It took some getting used to, and I have to say I couldn’t make a complete resolution. I relinquished the music most of the time, seduced by the dance’s urgency.

Verbum, the first piece on the program, began with a slightly coy moment when the dancers came in to try a few flings and shakes as the musicians tuned up. Then the Beethoven began and a dancer quartet let loose with a torrent of torso squiggles, leans and falls, handstands, traveling jumps, goofy elaborations, and a buddy joke or two. Before long another quartet joined them and the dance got even busier. The activity seldom coalesced into group designs; instead, each dancer worked more or less independently, sometimes catching a phrase from another. The space looked full and lively, the way a Cunningham dance does, but Cunningham’s movement vocabulary is more limited; his dancers could all be speaking the patois of one small village. Jones’s vocabulary speaks in as many tongues as there are people on the stage.

In the third movement, the dance concentrates down to a soloist, Toshiko Oiwa, and though her movement still spills out profusely, you get some sense of a personal journey. She begins with a long passage standing upstage with her back to the audience. I think this is a reference to Trisha Brown. When Jones asked to work with Brown some years ago, she taught him her back-to-the-audience solo If You Couldn’t See Me. Come to think of it, some of the movement Jones is into now looks kind of Brownian, the way she’ll push one body part into motion and let the rest of the body follow.

Oiwa eventually wends her way through a kind of corridor created by three large, irregular frames (all the sets for the evening were designed by Bjorn Amelan, the company’s associate artistic director). These squiggly structures get rearranged by the dancers in between musical movements. Oiwa almost distractedly sheds one move after another, as if nothing she could do pleased her enough to do again. Finally she returns to her original spot and makes one finger crawl up the other outstretched arm and up over her head.

The rest of the dancers return, and they end the Beethoven with little partner games of pushing and shoving, follow-the-leader, moving back-to-back. For the first time, they form a single diagonal line and do a few things all together. As the music ends, they all pitch forward and collapse.

The contemporary Hungarian composer György Kurtág writes tiny expressionistic epigrams — some are called Microludes — that sound a little like Berg or Bartók. World II (18 Movements to Kurtág) had a sleek, European feel to it. A large oblong panel hung lengthwise in the air against a black-curtained background. The dancers wore purposely unmatching black and white creations (by Liz Prince); the musicians, barefoot, wore white suits.

Again the dance featured lots of movement — it was eccentric, violent, touched off perhaps by the stresses and dissonance in the music. There seemed to be " characters, " or at least some of the dancers played roles. Two women (Leah Cox and Catherine Cabeen) worked in tandem much of the time, perhaps serving some ceremonial function, like doorkeepers. Denis Boroditski danced a long solo, as if asserting his dominance, then stooped over a stageful of fallen dancers and delivered a volley of figurative blows that made them yell convulsively. Ayo Janeen Jackson got lifted high like some priestess of santería. The musicians had some choreography too, moving into different spots while playing, and gesturing with their bows.

From time to time a very faint, wavy design was projected on the set piece, and as the dance was ending, the panel flew out, leaving a pale, projected shadow of itself on the black drapes.

For Black Suzanne, four more musicians joined the Orions in the pit to play the Shostakovich Prelude and Scherzo for String Octet. Eight dancers in red romper suits tumbled and flipped, lifted and threw themselves at one another on a floor covered with red mats.

The one respite in the program was to be the Orion Quartet playing the last two movements of the Ravel Quartet. But instead of just allowing us to listen to the music, Jones gave us Leah Cox doing a fast, very jittery improvisation during the slow movement. And during the fast finale, stagehands were laying down the floor mats for Black Suzanne.

Bill T. Jones’s newest community-dance idea is The Table Project, an eight-minute set of gamelike patterns that are rehearsed and performed consecutively by two different groups. I’m not sure whether he does this in other places, but in Boston there were seven girls between eight and 11 years old, and six men of a certain age, only one of them, Bill T. himself, a dancer. Given on a free program at the Shubert Thursday night and followed by a generous question-and-answer period, the project asked us to see our fellow civilians as dancers. By extension, this type of work always implies, we’ll be able to imagine ourselves dancing.

While the Boston Trio played Schubert’s Notturno piano trio in E-flat, the dancers-for-a-night ran around a large, high platform with blocklike shapes on it. The shapes provided obstacles of different heights for the performers to scramble over and balance on. During the short piece, individuals got a chance to be the group leader, everyone had a solo moment, and the piece ended with everyone stretching into his or her best flamboyant pose.

I thought the men looked rather bumbling and childlike at first; the audience even laughed indulgently when they ran around tagging one another or drew in the air with self-conscious authority. By the end, though, some of them got comfortable and moved with a grace they may never have imagined they had. The girls, on the other hand, looked as if they’d all had dance or acrobatics before. They threw themselves into their moves. Their gestures were spacious, even ornamental. They made mistakes and went right on.

The Table Project may be theoretically democratic, but the men were recruited from arts patrons and presenters, notably Wang Center president and CEO Josiah Spaulding, whereas the girls were picked in an audition. I’m not sure what this elitist casting does to the concept, but the individual performers all testified they had learned from their experience.

Issue Date: January 23 - 30, 2003
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