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Everything about Blauvelt Mountain is finely crafted and compelling. It’s almost too beautiful, too refined. I watched it mesmerized and now I can’t remember very much about it, except the crystalline perfection that gives its athleticism and roughhouse moments a rarified quality, like dried flowers. In Act I, “A Fiction,” Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane are dressed in black jumpsuits. There’s a half-built wall of cinder blocks in the back of the wide, shallow performing space, and a pale blue light suffuses the back wall, décor designed by William Katz. The air is suffused, too, with sound. The two men speak quietly to each other or murmur individually, and there are unobtrusive electronic noises controlled on the spot by composer Helen Thorington. The two dancers repeat over and over again certain movement sequences : Jones, whose physical beauty and precise coordination draw you (or me, anyway) to watch him more often than Zane, sits on a small cube and makes intricate hand gestures; Zane, a small wiry man, runs 84 k Under Glass Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane Blauvelt Mountain American Theater Laboratory February 5–26 : SoHo Weekly News, February 20, 1980 around and around in circles, embroidered with small leaps. Both lift, hold, support, balance, jump onto each other. All these activities are simultaneously rough and smooth, violent and affectionate, athletic and graceful. They build up, with the repetition, into a rhythmic fabric that gives the disparate activities a smooth and sensible shape, which soon becomes familiar. This ironically unwrinkled surface, full of rugged actions , gets broken from time to time as Jones and Zane stop to consult quietly about how the preceding round felt. The reflexive commentary just avoids coyness by taking place at the volume level so low it is usually inaudible. A sporadic verbal game of free-association is less interesting, though more audible. Act II, “An Interview,” contrasts in every way with the first act. Where the costumes were black, they are now white. The back wall too is a brilliant white. The electronic music is gone; instead, the soundtrack comes from a portable tape recorder Jones sets on the cinder block wall. His voice asks questions like: Where will we go? What will it look like there? Who will be the first person we meet? And later Zane’s voice is heard, giving a whole series of answers we match in our minds to the questions. Finally, after a long silence, the two monologues are intercut to fit together as a single “interview.” And the movements have changed from a rolling fabric full of wild details and covering all the space, to two singular actions. Zane, wearing workman’s gloves, deconstructs the wall and rebuilds it perpendicular to its original position. Jones dances up and down a corridor parallel to the new wall but wider than and including it. Sometimes he has to jump over the wall that’s under construction. When the wall’s completed, he dances forward and back along a single line, launching into a paroxysm of motion , arms and legs sputtering in every direction, while delivering a halfmelancholy , half-comic, fantastical monologue about his own death. It’s that final, agitated death jig that stays with me now, days later, even though I remember feeling beguiled by all the actions in “A Fiction .” I wonder what would happen if this collaboration let itself get messier. Under Glass 85 ...

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