Review: After 30 Years, a Controversial Dance Is Just a Dance
The New York Times
At the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Bill T. Jones’s “Still/Here” returns, free of the AIDS-era context in which it premiered.
Nothing distorts culture like a culture war. Bill T. Jones’s “Still/Here” was the most controversy-generating dance work of the 1990s, but watching a 30th anniversary revival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Wednesday was a bit like watching Toto draw back the curtain. “Still/Here” is just a dance: a sophisticated, good-looking dance — but one that, removed from the context of its origin and reception, is surprisingly ordinary.
“Still/Here” grew out of so-called survivor workshops that Jones, who was known to be H.I.V. positive, led with volunteers who had faced or were facing life-threatening illnesses. He incorporated movements, sound and video from these workshops into a two-hour piece performed by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company in 1994. (Zane had died of AIDS in 1988.)
Arlene Croce, the dance critic of The New Yorker, refused to see the work but wrote about it anyway, decrying it (and Jones) as a particularly coercive example of what she labeled victim art. Then came a battle of responses by major cultural figures in opinion essays and letters to the editor.
The revival of “Still/Here” retains the original video design, by Gretchen Bender, which features the faces and voices of the original volunteers and a 42-year-old Jones. The cast is all new, half its members too young to have been alive in 1994. The work starts with a glossary, as the dancers sequentially recite the name of a volunteer and act out the self-identifying movement phrase that person improvised. These phrases are understandably humble and hokey; Jones uses all his formal skills to try to transmute them into transcendent art. He never quite succeeds.
As the controversy obscured, “Still/Here” is full of athletic, often beautiful dance. The young, agile performers run back and forth in tidal patterns and interpenetrating formations. They leap, lean, struggle and collapse. They hold one another up, sometimes overhead. They cross their legs in balletic fifth position and jump-kick, as in martial arts. In one motif, they balance heroically on one leg, with the other leg and their torsos extended on perpendicular plane.
