After the polls closed Nov. 2, 2004 and President Bush’s victory became clear, his supporters celebrated, and Democrats wondered how they could have lost the White House during a seemingly ignoble war gone very wrong.
Analysts pored over the results, with some saying the vote was a referendum on the Iraq conflict and others suggesting the election was swayed more than anyone first realized by moral hot buttons such as gay marriage and abortion.
In the crucible of this contentious aftermath, renowned dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones conceived his 1 1/2-hour work, “Blind Date.” He and his 10-member company perform it Friday evening at the Newman Center for the Performing Arts.
“I think the election was a bit of a debacle in which the discourse was so split – this whole red-and-blue-state thing,” Jones, 54, said from Madison, Wis., where the company was performing.
“Whoever heard of such a thing before? But now we accept it. This is called political discourse? I think it’s paralysis.”
“Blind Date” combines Jones’ distinctive movement with narration, video and a high-tech set by Bjorn Amelan. Its score
incorporates music ranging from Otis Redding to Tuareg throat singing to Johann Sebastian Bach.
The piece confronts issues raised by the election and inevitably reinforced by subsequent revelations such as the government’s domestic spying program. Among them are war, patriotism, freedom, religion and morality.
Although Jones remains angry and frustrated by the direction the country has taken, he didn’t want to just lay out a checklist of opinions and create a kind of choreographed anti-war or anti-Bush polemic.
Instead, the African-American choreographer has assembled something more complex and less easy to define. The multimedia work draws on theology, philosophy and literature from the past and present, as well as the views of his diverse company members.
“I turned to my dancers and I asked them – I said there is a lot going on in the world right now around ideas of free speech, patriotism, courage, honor, bravery … and I said to them: How do you feel about that?” he said.
Although personal expression – his and the dancers’ – forms a major part of this work, he hopes to go further than just delivering a message. He wants to engage the audience in a meaningful way.
“That is what adults do, right?” he said. “And it’s what we’re trying to teach children how to do, how to deal with conflict, how to to be able to use empathy and reasoning to be able to understand contrary points of view. And I think that’s what I’d like my art to do.”
Jones admits that the piece’s light-hearted title does not seem at first blush to conform to the gravity of the subject matter.
“I say it’s a trash title for a nontrash topic,” he said. “Now, why a trash title like that? I don’t know. There was something maybe about the overseriousness that I was feeling. I was sending myself up a bit.”
However whimsical the title might be, it nonetheless speaks to what is at the heart of this work: the meeting or blind date between Jeffersonian ideals and what Jones sees in today’s elections, “photo ops, sound bites and manipulation of people’s most poorly conceived sense of themselves.”
Now, if all this seems more focused more on social and political discourse than art, Jones maintains that a dance work, like any artistic creation, must deal in some way with beauty to be successful.
“I think something has to be visually arresting in order to draw people to it,” he said. “And it has to have what I call lyricism and mystery to satisfy the hunger that makes people go out looking to art as opposed to sports or what have you.”
But, he quickly adds, the “business of beauty” must be a means to an end. In the case of “Blind Date,” this is nothing less than an examination of the American conscience.
While a few other choreographers have tackled social issues in their work, few if any have done so in a more direct or confrontational way than Jones.
In 1994, the choreographer, who has been HIV-positive for two decades, created his most widely known and controversial work. Titled “Still/Here,” it explored mortality using videotaped testimonies of people suffering life-threatening illness such as AIDS and cancer.
Arlene Croce, one of the nation’s more prominent dance critics at the time, created a furor when she declined to cover it, calling it “victim art” and writing in a New Yorker essay that Jones had crossed the line between art and reality.
Although “Still/Here” generated protests from extremists, such as anti-gay activists associated with the Rev. Fred Phelps of Topeka, Kan., audience reactions were generally positive, even in parts of Middle America such as Lincoln, Neb.
Perhaps for reasons that have more to do with today’s political climate than the content of the piece, “Blind Date,” so far at least, has provoked comment but not the same kind of uproar as “Still/Here.”
“I think it causes a lot of discussions that I don’t hear, people trying to understand, in fact, what they are supposed to be feeling and thinking,” Jones said. “I think a good work of art should always do that.”
He founded his company in 1982 with his dance and life partner Arnie Zane, who died 1988 of AIDS-related lymphoma. It is still called the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company.
No longer the struggling up-and-comer, Jones is a prominent figure in the dance world with more than 50 works to his credit. He has won numerous awards, including a prestigous MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.”
Although some dancers retire around age 40, Jones continues to dance, with a central role in “Blind Date.” But he acknowledges that as he has moved into his 50s, he has had to learn to “do more with less.”
He still performs solo evenings of dance, but unlike in the past when he was alone onstage, he is now joined at times by two other dancers.
“That is to satisfy that part of me that needs to be center stage and dancing,” he said. “I don’t feel that part of my personality rules like it used to. The performer has made room for the director now.”
Jones has reached an age that he could be the father and even grandfather of his dancers. That transformation has made him reconsider his role as the company’s leader.
“It makes me think in a more holistic way about what our institution is and what its future is,” he said. “It makes me think about what in fact a young artist gets when they come into my orbit. What are my values? I have to be more responsible for them.”
Jones acknowledges that he is a glass-half-empty kind of guy, but he is not a fatalist. Recalling praise he once received during a college theater production, he believes he has what he calls natural forward momentum.
“I do believe there is a great truth that is there if only I could find a way to it,” he said. “I believe that if I struggle through this experience of life and what is has to offer, I will find, for lack of a better word, grace.
“Does that make me a positive or negative person?”
Fine arts critic Kyle MacMillan can be reached at 303-820-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com.
