Checking the Time: Bill T. Jones's American Utopia

The lush velvet curtain parts to reveal a bare stage, adorned only by the provocative image at the center of its backdrop. With no dancing bodies to anchor our gaze downstage, we are inescapably riveted to the image: Black Suzanne herself. This big, strangely ominous figure is a goofy flower, a plump red daisy, its petals outlined in sleek and utterly cool black lines. At its center is the newly hybridized "happy face"—part Japanese cartoon, part jack-o-lantern, part minstrel mask. It is an image that evokes a giddy mix of emotions: it mocks, it confuses, and it guilelessly welcomes us into a January 2002 landscape that coyly seems to ask, What time is this place?

After a few beats that allow us to register all this, the space gradually fills with dancers who walk onstage and proceed with the labor of laying down red puzzle-shaped pieces of floor matting. They are dressed in costumes modeled on Chinese army diving costumes: tightly padded red leotards that look hi-tech and suggest combat and wrestling. The dancers' actions are deliberate, yet strained by a sense of urgency. They make way for something, and then move nearer to the wings, arms akimbo and legs anchored in an open second-position stance, as two women (dancers Toshiko Oiwa and Ayo Janeen Jackson) position themselves at center stage. We soon learn that they have positioned themselves here purposefully and that we are about to witness an unspoken and violent sort of contest, a race. Throughout the piece, these two frequently come within each other's orbit as if they are moving within some magnetic force-field that draws them near and then quickly flings them apart. In one motif, they approach each other from opposite sides of the stage while held four feet off the floor. Stepping on the raised, cupped hands of their teammates below them, they haltingly walk toward each other. When they meet, they embrace. Just as quickly the momentum of the dance pulls them apart and they tumble into the arms of the other dancers, who help them to recover from these risky moves and prop them up in preparation for whatever might come next: the petite Ayo Janeen Jackson becomes a human missile, hurled through space by her teammates;Toshiko Oiwa takes our breath away as she fearlessly falls from the heights of precarious lifts.

In between the fleeting moments of intimacy suggested by the two women, the stage is consumed by the ensemble work of the entire group of eight dancers who catapult themselves and each other through the space, for they too are at the mercy of this dance's momentum. In unison they lunge, leap, and somersault over each other, spinning 'round themselves and each other like helicopters and hummingbirds gracefully and fiercely battling their way through rugged and chaotic terrain. In this ensemble work, the movement patterns vary, and this adds to the urgency of the scene. At times the stage empties and fills in rushes of bodies whose slicing arms and legs propel the action of this strange combat, and at other times the dancers are rooted to one spot as if part of some larger clockwork. From the fierce athleticism of wrestling and kickboxing and the physically demanding partnering work reminiscent of early contact improvisation to the more stationary yet precise legwork of a Cunningham and ballet-inflected petit allegro, the dancers alternate between moving as a unit, and separating into smaller teams.

We enter this high-velocity world through Bjorn Amelan's stark design, the poignant and crashing drama of Shostakovich's "Prelude and Scherzo for String Octet, Op. 11," the labor of dancers working toward some unknown goal, and the kinetic intimacy of the explosive partnering work. There is no overt narrative other than that suggested by the image of Black Suzanne and the musical and choreographic structures: the work begins with a duet that is both tender and turbulent, and ends with the same two women returning to their opening embrace. But whereas the opening embrace was solitary and private, the closing...