Analogy: A Trilogy by Bill T. Jones (review)

For three successive nights I went to see the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company’s recent work at the American Dance Festival in Durham, North Carolina. On hot and rainy summer nights, I saw Analogy/Dora: Tramontane (2015), Analogy/Lance: Pretty Boy aka The Escape Artist (2016), and the international premiere of Analogy/Ambros: The Emigrant (2017). This trilogy draws on oral history and explores our historical method’s parameters of narration and embodiment. The Southern three-part performance was the first time Analogy: A Trilogy could be seen in its entirety. Audiences returned each night to watch the dancers convey and layer the stories of three figures from different eras and experiences. Through the stories of Dora, Bill T. Jones’s mother-in-law; Lance, his nephew; and Ambros, a character in W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants, the project joins Jewish experiences of Vichy France, African American experiences of nineteen-nineties club cultures, and German émigré experiences in the first half of the twentieth century. The performances were linked through emotional connection grounded in dialogue, mediums of recorded memory, and persistent listening for queer pasts. While the Analogy trilogy draws parallels of illness, loss, and war, one aspect that particularly ties the three pieces together can be referred to as an ethos of queer familial connectivity. This methodology looks at relations through a prism of nonhetero familial ties. Using oral history as a dance method, the company presents an intersectional and intergenerational project of queer remembering.

In the director’s note, Bill T. Jones grounds Analogy: A Trilogy with a quotation from The Emigrants:

Memory often strikes me as a kind of dumbness. It makes one’s head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds.

(W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse [London: Harvill Press, 1996], 145.)

For Jones, Sebald opens up temporal space and centers dialogue in the process of recall. Drawing from the German author “as a mentor of sorts,” Jones mounts a trio of dance works in which historical moments fold toward and away from each other. Through what Jones calls an “origami” narrative, the performances seek out the memories of others.

Analogy: A Trilogy’s first piece portrays the intimacy of an interviewer/narrator relationship. Over the course of a few evenings in 2002, Jones interviewed his husband Bjorn’s mother Dora. During World War II, Dora was a Jewish teenager in Vichy France, working in resistance activities and advocating for detainees in internment camps at the foot of the Pyrenees Mountains. Analogy/Dora: Tramontane refers to the region’s harsh wind. (From the Latin transmontanus, literally “across the mountains,” the Italian tramontano is used figuratively to mean “foreign,” as is tramontane in both English and French.) The company’s choreography incorporates the process of the eight-hour interview, staging Dora’s experiences from the joy of watching Marcel Marceau to the loss of close family. The piece includes a live, original score containing songs of Dora’s childhood, works of Schubert (championed by Nazi leadership), and house music. Dancers, diverse in race and gender, recite excerpts of the ninety-six-page transcript, translated and transcribed by Bjorn.

Analogy/Lance: Pretty Boy aka The Escape Artist chronicles an oral history project started in 2014 between Bill T. Jones and his nephew Lance T. Briggs. This piece delves into Lance’s life history as a queer kid of color on the streets of San Francisco, a young dancer, and a sex worker. It follows Lance and his alter ego “Pretty” into adulthood through struggles with addiction, prison, AIDS, and midlife physical paralysis. The performance portrays an intimate dialogue, primarily over the phone, between gay uncle and gay nephew. The regular calls build a repetition of conversation and present a depth not often undertaken in oral history interviews. Towards the piece’s...