Thirty years after its premiere, the historic dance theater work Still/Here by Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company remounted the timeless piece. The performance’s ability to evoke a spirit of survival — and a sense of peace — was worthy of celebration.
The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane dance company, founded in 1982, was known for their diverse cast of dancers and thought-provoking subjects of dance. Still/Here premiered in 1994 at Brooklyn Academy of Music, with music by Kenneth Frazelle (including folk singer Odetta) and Vernon Reid, and multimedia elements by Gretchen Bender. The era was considered a peak, critical time of the AIDS epidemic, with more than 41,000 U.S. residents dying of AIDS-related deaths. This was just before effective treatments became available. Jones and Zane were both diagnosed with HIV in the mid-1980s, and in 1988, Zane died from AIDS-related complications.
These days, HIV/AIDS has shifted from a near-death sentence with rapidly rising mortality to a manageable chronic condition, despite remaining a major global health challenge. In 1994, treatment options were limited and less effective. Now, antiretroviral therapy or ART is standard, and more than 30 million people have access to treatment globally. Yet, a projected 30-40% drop in external funding for HIV could potentially disrupt treatment and prevention services, possibly leading to millions of new infections and deaths if not addressed.
While much has changed in the world, another pandemic behind us, wars raging, and environmental strife, questions around mortality remain.
Jones’ positive HIV status led to his work being associated with HIV/AIDS, but it was after Zane’s death that Jones’ choreography began to focus on racial, political, and social issues. Still/Here is about death. It was influenced by people’s real suffering from deadly diseases like AIDS and cancer. Further, at that time, some cultural narratives focused on long-term survival, with individuals starting to experience “post-AIDS stress syndrome” as they began to outlive initial fatal expectations. This is where Still/Here broke boundaries, defining and ultimately transcending its era.
The structure of Still/Here is delivered with simplicity and sophistication, including spoken text, video portraits, breathtaking dance and the abstract nature of gesture. Recordings played by people talking from the “Survival Workshops: Talking and Moving about Life and Death.” The Survival Workshops were conducted across the country with people living with life-threatening illnesses. The first one was held in November 1992 in Austin, TX as an experiment to see what, if anything, could be collected that would inform a dance/theater work. They are the essence of Still/Here; this work is dedicated to them.
The lush performance opened with 10 dancers and gorgeous string music by The Lark Quintet. The group captured perfectly the challenge of turning the participants’ primal feelings into music. In one solo, dancer Danielle Marshall stood in regal form, downstage center, in a white, flowing tunic. A recorded female voice said, “I didn’t want this but it came anyway …” Marshall’s motif of repeated gestures imparted the woman’s statements with commanding grace, at once exuding strength and vulnerability.
The combination of visual media (workshop participants, digital scenography, and scenic color blocking), profoundly affecting music, and Odetta’s “Odacious” voice (often called “The Voice of the Civil Rights Movement”), combined with the dancers’ poetic movement, presented a dance of resilience.
This phenomenon occurred throughout the work. For the body to articulate the scores of emotions experienced when diagnosed with a terminal disease is to bear witness to that transformation. It’s a gift to see and is what made Still/Here’s meditative motifs cathartic.
Survival Workshop videos were used in the actual performance, but Jones also used them to develop the choreography, through rewatching the videos and studying participants’ movements. This allowed him to develop a “Verbatim Dance Theatre,” the essence of which is seen in the repeating theme of dancers being supported by the group.
At the start of the next act, the dancers wore red, foreshadowing strength, be it to carry on, to accept fate, or to keep fighting. This act was livelier, highlighting kinetic force and bodily control. In a tangential detail, having lived through a pandemic, the performance as a whole recalled the experiences and emotions, the uncertainty that COVID-19 dropped upon the world.
This choreographic language, blending jazz, modern and ballet, materialized as dancers swayed, or stepped with cautious intention, lept, flipped and kicked, leaned on, supported and embraced one another, translating tone and emotion into dance in surprising and unconventional forms. In one such instance, dancer Hannah Seiden stood en face with her male counterpart, holding hands, and swiftly jumped up to land her knees and calves over his shoulders, in a split second.
Survival Workshop recordings ran, (“I want to make love to someone; Everyone’s connected to someone; Tell me how to fight this disease because I am going to win; Did you think you’d escape? Yes; I’m stepping in and out of reality; There’s a place for denial”). Screens projected a graphic red heart as violins and percussion played on with rapid, driving energy, as the company danced with the grace and force of resilience.
It was inspirational!
“Mortality is an aspect of the human condition that does not follow fashions nor aesthetic conversations. It is a powerful fact that we can only stand our ground in the face of – or we fall down and are swept away…” — Bill T. Jones.