bill t jones arnie zane company Archives - Dance Magazine

10 Must-See Shows Hitting Stages This April

Dance Magazine — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 13:00:00 +0000

The spring performance season is moving full steam ahead with literary-inspired ballets, a queer reimagining of Carmen, and premieres drawing from everything from the upcoming solar eclipse to contemporary American politics. Here’s what’s grabbing our attention.

NDT in NYC

NDT in William Forsythe’s 12 N. Photo by Rahi Rezvani, courtesy New York City Center/NDT.

NEW YORK CITY Nederlands Dans Theater returns to New York City Center for the first time since Emily Molnar took the helm. William Forsythe’s N.N.N.N. is joined by a pair of U.S. premieres: Imre and Marne van Opstal’s The Point Being and Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar’s Jakie. April 3–6. nycitycenter.org. —Courtney Escoyne

Centering Latina Voices

Annabelle Lopez Ochoa rehearsing her Broken Wings with San Francisco Ballet. Photo by Lindsay Rallo, courtesy SFB.

SAN FRANCISCO The Carmen premiering at San Francisco Ballet this month won’t look or sound the same as usual. Choreographer Arielle Smith (a 2022 “25 to Watch” pick) sets the tale in contemporary Cuba—specifically at the family restaurant to which the titular heroine returns with her new husband after the death of her mother—while refocusing the story on Carmen and emphasizing the depth and complexity of the characters with cinematic flair. Escamillo, whom Carmen falls in love with, is recast as a woman, and the new score by Arturo O’Farrill only references the familiar Bizet opera as it layers in Cuban folk music. Joining the new ballet on the Dos Mujeres program is Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s Frida Kahlo–inspired Broken Wings (which SFB artistic director Tamara Rojo commissioned and starred in during her English National Ballet tenure). The evening marks the first double bill choreographed by women and the first full program dedicated to Latinx stories at SFB. April 4–14. sfballet.org. —CE

Eclipsing All Else

the feath3r theory’s The Absolute Future. Photo courtesy the feath3r theory.

NEW YORK CITY Ahead of the Great North American Eclipse on April 8, the feath3r theory alights at NYU Skirball to premiere a devised dance theater work about a group of friends who team up to watch the celestial event and miss it. Raja Feather Kelly draws on Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death, the popularity of the science fiction concept of the multiverse, and the ways social media exacerbates loneliness and society’s inability to face it for The Absolute Future (or Death, Loneliness, and The Absolute Future of the Multiverse, or How to Cover the Sun with Mud). April 5–6. nyuskirball.org. —CE

Carnival of Politics

Marc Bamuthi Joseph and Wendy Whelan. Photo by Leslie Lyons, courtesy SOZO.

SEATTLE Choreographed and directed by Francesca Harper and performed by dancer Wendy Whelan and poet Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Carnival of the Animals reframes the Camille Saint-Saëns classic to consider the animals of a political jungle as it responds to the January 6 insurrection and contemplates the future of democracy. The SOZO-produced work premieres at the Meany Center for the Performing Arts on April 6. sozoartists.com. —CE

Memories of Matriarchs

Jasmine Hearn in their Memory Fleet: A Return to Matr. Photo by Jay Warr, courtesy DiverseWorks.

HOUSTON With three “Bessie” Awards, the Rome Prize, and a sumptuous stage presence, Jasmine Hearn is one of the most acclaimed contemporary dance artists to come out of Houston. But Memory Fleet: A Return to Matr, a performance, installation, and online archive that preserves the memories of eight Black Houston matriarchs, is their first major commission in their hometown. Commissioned by DiverseWorks, the multidisciplinary project includes original sound scores, choreography, and garments, along with guest performances by former Houston Ballet soloist Sandra Organ Solis and additional vocals and performances by local dancers and “Houston Aunties,” as Hearn calls them. The premiere at Houston Met April 6–7 will be followed by tours to Pittsburgh and New York City. diverseworks.org. —Nancy Wozny

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

The Royal Ballet in Wayne McGregor’s Woolf Works. Photo by Andrej Uspenski, courtesy ABT.

COSTA MESA, CA American Ballet Theatre presents the North American premiere of Woolf Works, Wayne McGregor’s three-act meditation on the writings of Virginia Woolf, at Segerstrom Center for the Arts. Inspired by her novels Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and The Waves as well as her letters and diaries, the critically acclaimed ballet eschews narrative adaptation to take a stream of consciousness approach to the modernist writer’s oeuvre. April 11–14. abt.org. —CE

Packed With Premieres

South Chicago Dance Theatre’s Mya Bryant and Kim Davis. Photo by Michelle Reid Photography, courtesy SCDT.

CHICAGO South Chicago Dance Theatre returns to the Auditorium Theatre for an evening filled to the brim with premieres by Donald Byrd, Joshua Blake Carter, Monique Haley, Tsai Hsi Hung, Terence Marling, and founding executive artistic director Kia Smith. April 27. southchicagodancetheatre.com. —CE

The Weight of a Lie

Cathy Marston. Photo by Erik Tomasson, courtesy San Francisco Ballet.

ZURICH Cathy Marston brings her penchant for literary adaptation to Atonement, her first new work as Ballett Zürich’s director. In Ian McEwan’s novel and Joe Wright’s acclaimed film adaptation, teenage writer Briony Tallis tells a deliberate lie about her older sister’s lover and spends the rest of her life attempting to make up for its unintended consequences. Marston transfers the action to the world of ballet, making Tallis a choreographer while wrestling with the story’s questions about the fallibility of memory and the nature of self-deception and guilt. April 28–June 7. opernhaus.ch. —CE

A Jazzy Centennial

Dance artists join the nationwide celebration of iconic jazz drummer and composer Max Roach.

Max Roach. Photo courtesy Richard Kornberg & Associates.

Max Roach 100 at The Joyce Theater

NEW YORK CITY Richard Colton curated The Joyce Theater’s Max Roach 100 program, which will feature a new work to Roach’s Percussion Bitter Sweet album by Ronald K. Brown for Malpaso Dance Company and EVIDENCE, A Dance Company; Rennie Harris Puremovement in The Dream/It’s Time; and a solo by tap star Ayodele Casel set to a series of duets by Roach and Cecil Taylor. April 2–7. joyce.org. —CE

Bill T. Jones at Harlem Stage

NEW YORK CITY Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company revisits Degga, a 1995 collaboration between Jones, Max Roach, and Toni Morrison, as part of Harlem Stage’s E-Moves program. Also on offer is a new work by Roderick George. April 19–20. harlemstage.org. —CE

Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company in Curriculum II. Photo by Maria Baranova, courtesy Blake Zidell & Associates.

The post 10 Must-See Shows Hitting Stages This April appeared first on Dance Magazine.

The Show That Would Have Been: Bill T. Jones Talks Deep Blue Sea

Zachary Whittenburg — Sun, 12 Apr 2020 23:00:00 +0000

Editor’s note: The following interview was conducted by phone on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, January 20, 2020. Eight weeks later, on March 17, New York Live Arts
announced the cancellation
of the premiere of
Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company
‘
s
Deep Blue Sea, originally scheduled to run April 14–25 at the Park Avenue Armory. We have decided to share excerpts from that conversation with Jones, though the premiere of Deep Blue Sea has not yet been rescheduled.

Deep Blue Sea
is a massive undertaking. A host of recognized creatives in architecture, design and music are working with Bill T. Jones to fill the Park Avenue Armory’s 55,000-square-foot drill hall—among the largest rooms in New York City. “It is my honor to be commissioned by the Armory,” says Jones, who also performs in the work, ending a 15-year hiatus from the stage. “But the Armory is a motherf***er. There is no space like it. Where do you rehearse?” The answer has largely been “away from the city,” hosted by Bethany Arts Community, MASS MoCA and others; each residency has been a chance to experiment with building a cast of 100 people. “Working people. Family people. Not a bunch of cool dancers from Brooklyn,” he says. “Well, some are cool dancers from Brooklyn. They can be between ages 16 and 70. I was going to say 65 but then realized I am already 68, so that’s not very fair.”

BTJ/AZ Company on Instagram: ““Deep Blue Sea” features a community extended from our own of 100 people that will join us in the world premiere at the Park Avenue Armory,…”

It’s good to reconnect—we last spoke in 2011.

Right. Life goes on.

It seems auspicious that today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, as his speech “I Have a Dream” is among the source material you’ve referenced for
Deep Blue Sea. How does it appear in the work?

I perform it backwards, with the words in retrograde, so it sounds like a bit of Dada poetry. I suppose it’s too late for a spoiler alert now. That speech, though, is an American icon and, for me and for a lot of people, it’s as important as the United States Constitution. I grew up in a Martin Luther King–loving household. My parents were very religious people, and I always thought I agreed wholeheartedly with this notion that we shall overcome. Now it’s very much an open question.

“
Will we overcome?”

Don’t you ask the same question?

At times.

Right. And why is that? There is a very sticky and potentially explosive conversation that, along with the election, is going to ask us, “Are we really still this beacon, this light on a hill, this conglomerate of disparate groups and stakeholders that we call American democracy?” This work deals with that ambiguity.

Your sources also include
Moby-Dick. Where does Melville intersect with Dr. King?

Well, in Moby-Dick there was a little black boy on the boat whose name is Pip. He is an unlikely character among the macho, cantankerous and combative population of the Pequod, which Melville has artfully used as a metaphor for modern society. He is the least powerful person on the boat, and this is what attracted me to him. The fact is, I turned an accusing eye on myself: I remembered so much about the book, but I didn’t remember this character! And I suppose reading the book in the wake of Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, trans rights, all those things: We look at the under-observed in our society with newfound respect now—at least some of us do. Martin Luther King and Pip come together in that poetic, though tenuous and metaphorical, association.

Is this a first time for you collaborating on production design with an architect?

Hm. Yes, it is. And Liz Diller says, “I don’t do décor; I’m involved in dramaturgy.”

So much of her and her partners’ work is about movement. The High Line isn’t really a building at all, but a path; The Shed has movable components; The Juilliard School renovation is about circulation and space…

What you say about movement in their work is very true. Is Deep Blue Sea an architectural project? Yes, it is, and no, it is not.

You once said to me that “creation, when you’re in the heat of it, is a near-sacred thing that you don’t really control. It controls you.” Do you still feel that way, or do you feel more in control now? Do you even want more control?

I don’t think it’s changed much. I don’t think that I have the ultimate agency, particularly when you’re working with persons who come from very distant disciplines like architecture, and they are very accomplished artists who have strong senses of their own voices. I am not more free. Am I more diplomatic? I don’t know. Am I better at working through problems? Not really, but I do have people around me who are, like Janet Wong, my associate who is an extremely politic and kind person, and yet she’s very strong. Whereas I might scream, she has other ways of getting what she wants.

What besides dance interests you today?

I’m reading the work of Octavia Butler, who is in some ways the grande dame of Afro-Futurism, before it even had a name. Now, of course, it’s a visual art movement; there is a version that is coming literally from Africa. We are now in the post–Black Panther era, and the black community is not the only community that is interested in speculative space. Native American people, Asian people, queer people, are all in some ways using speculative fiction.

Along with their main objectives, it seems social movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo aim to remind us we have physical bodies, as opposed to just virtual identities. Is that another association for you as a choreographer?

I appreciate your framing of the question, but some of us have lived our whole lives, our whole creative lives… [pauses] If you are a black man of my description, and you’re working in the white avant-garde, you know these things deep in your bones. Maybe there was no language or no appetite for discussing them as there is now, but it’s not like it was a revelation for many of us. I would say to you as a writer, when you say “we,” who are you talking about? Who is the “we” that makes aesthetic judgments and defines art movements?

BTJ/AZ Company on Instagram: “#TBT to thinking about democracy and the elusive “we” during these fractious times…all while celebrating a birthday with 100+ amazing…”

You said earlier that the idea of “we” was a central question of
Deep Blue Sea.

That is a central question of my life right now. Because I have been the cool black guy in a room full of cool white people. There was a time when I could count on one hand, Ralph Lemon, Bebe Miller, Blondell Cummings, Ishmael Houston-Jones: There were only a handful of us. Why was that? Let’s talk about our history—even in the avant-garde. Let’s talk about our history in light of what we have discovered about our society. On that note, I think I have to go because I have to be upstairs in one minute.

I appreciate your time.

Thank you. There is a lot more here we can be talking about. These are questions about the field that I think are crying out for serious attention.

The post The Show That Would Have Been: Bill T. Jones Talks Deep Blue Sea appeared first on Dance Magazine.