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  • Keeping Up With Jones
  • Lori Ortiz (bio)

Choreographer and director Bill T. Jones, with the help of set designer Bjorn G. Amelan, transformed The Gatehouse, a newly renovated Harlem performance venue, into a chapel—a sacred, non-denominational space. In his autobiographical book Last Night On Earth Jones related a childhood role as one of the wise men in a Christmas pageant.1 The mature artist has come home to question the sacred/secular dialectic with his site-specific Chapel/Chapter. The walls are draped with red and the theatre as church is one chapter in time.

Jones rented office space in Harlem for his Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company about two years ago. Though Harvey Lichtenstein offered a home in BAM's developing cultural district, Jones wanted to be in the cultural capital of Black America. "We can break a lot of rules about high and low art here in Harlem," he said at an October panel on the then nearly complete Gatehouse at 135th Street and Convent Avenue.2 It is a stone's throw from City University's Aaron Davis Hall and both are facilities of Harlemstage presenters. Jones's Chapel/ Chapter was commissioned as part of The Gatehouse's Waterworks inaugural series this fall.

Waterworks draws its title from the fact that the 1890 Romanesque Revival style Gatehouse was built as part of the aqueduct system that distributed water to New York City. It was subsequently used as a civic church and a playground. Jones touches on these incarnations in the new multimedia work, which may be the most fully and succinctly realized of his recent oeuvre, which enjoys across-the-board appeal. People respond to the fact that Jones speaks to the myriad of moral dilemmas of our day. It seems that as he works, his focus is cumulative.

Love and loss are always present. Close encounters are the 2002 passing of his mother and that of his partner in life and art, Arnie Zane, in 1988. Continuously present too, are his churchgoing memories, his advocacy of human values, and his vision of racial harmony and freedom of sexual preference (rainbow vision) that acknowledges differences [End Page 81] with a cast of diverse body types and stories of individual dancers. Signature Jones is the suggestion that we have the power to determine our fate.

After seeing his Blind Date (2005), I felt high, temporarily empowered to make amends for past wrongdoings and apathy. In that dance, Jones expressed his fear that we are on a collision course with a disastrous future. In the Lincoln Center Festival production, Dancer Charles Scott plays a boy who works for a fast food joint and then goes off to war. At the end of the dance I saw myself as personally responsible for his fate.

Process

Chapter/Chapel collages these primary elements: a dancer's childhood homosexual experience, adapted court transcripts of two crimes that can more or less be recognized from tabloid headlines: the murder of a child, and the child abuse that preceded it, and the murder of a rural family of four by an intruder. Into this mix, "four marines carried in a small white box covered with white flowers," a line of poetic text read while the cast looks upward in unison, like a parade stopped dead in its tracks. They resemble a congregation turned toward a makeshift pulpit. If these juxtapositions seem unlikely, they do make choreographic sense.

Jones worked concurrently on the new Broadway production Spring Awakening. He compares the processes eloquently in his blog, "Spring Awakening is all about storytelling. Chapel/Chapter reluctantly illustrates three stories," and, "In Chapel/Chapter as in all of my works, the points of entry are various and often at odds with one another."3

In Chapel/Chapter Wen-Chun Lin swings his leg over hostage Mr. Soto (Charles Scott) and draws the string of the plastic bag to the workmanlike music of Daniel Bernard Roumain—recalling musical theatre like Porgy and Bess, or musicality in a good story ballet or any dance where the music seems to drive the movement, which is inextricable from the narrative if there is one. Eric Monte IS the...

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