The Body as Archive

All too often it seems the human memory is too short. History is easily forgotten and, in a week where Americans are still processing the results of the presidential election, it is hard not to feel like we are doomed to repeat ourselves. Thankfully, two recent works—one a recreation, and the other a New York City premiere—push back against such cynicism and defeatism. Both underscore the body’s vast stores of knowledge and ability to render the past in vivid detail in the present.

Performance

“Still/Here” by Bill T. Jones / “Movement” by Netta Yerushalmy

Place

Brooklyn Academy of Music / NYU Skirball, New York, NY, October 30 & November 1, 2024

Words

Candice Thompson

Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company in “Still/Here.” Photograph by Nir Arieli

In 1994, “Still/Here,” premiered at Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of the Next Wave Festival. On October 30th, after thirty years, it returned to BAM (with support from Van Cleef & Arpels’ Dance Reflections) with much fanfare, an aura of celebration surrounding it. And why not? The dance theater work and its creator have endured.

Three decades ago, the idea that Jones might develop a work of art from the experiences of people living with terminal illnesses like AIDS and cancer was shocking to some, like New Yorker critic Arlene Croce, who panned the work without seeing it in an essay called “Discussing the Undiscussable.” Her rant—filled with strange and fearful assumptions—incited a passionate, but unfortunately misguided, dialogue about something she termed “victim art.”

However, experiencing the work in 2024, I am pleased to report that “Still/Here” is less provocative than the context all that critical grandstanding would seem to imply, but no less poignant.

For me, much of the power and restive emotion came from formal elements. The audio and video recordings of terminally ill participants in Jones’s Survival Workshops (which were subtitled “Talking and Moving about Life and Death” and began in 1992, when the toll of the AIDS crisis was devastatingly apparent) play at intervals throughout the two-act performance and were the seed of all the creative elements. In candid tones, participants of all ages recount stories of receiving test results, muse on what they had hoped to do in their lives, meditate on relationships with religion and God, and vow to fight against the disease. At one point their voices speak at once and the overlapping hum gives the impression of being stuck between radio stations, or in this case, the liminal space between life and death. Eventually, they imagine their death. All of this works because Jones uses a variety of theatrical techniques to keep melodrama at bay.

Hannah Seiden in “Still/Here.” Photograph by Nir Arieli

Sometimes we hear the participants’ words in their own voice and other times, the dancers narrate. Their phrases also reverberate as lyrics in the operatic music of the first half, with highly repetitious constructions—“her eyes, her eyes, her eyes”—accompanying the more technical and virtuosic dancing. Vigorous jumping and combative partnering set up an energetic tension with yearning leg lifts and contemplative balances, like when Huiwang Zhang assumes a lateral arabesque, both arms pointing sharply to the ground. In a cast of standouts, Zhang and Mak Thornquest continually drew my eye, even when the stage was busy with simultaneous actions.

Gretchen Bender’s environment of shifting video screens reconfigured with each new section. They appear as opaque blue or red rectangles before displaying portraits of the participants and small snippets of workshop footage. They are also canvasses for Jones’s graphic video art. In one moment, a horizontal line of screens features animations of beating hearts. In another section, two screens stacked on top of each cycle through a grotesque series of fast cuts featuring disembodied anatomical parts: teeth, eyeballs, feet, hands, a chest.

But the themes of mortality and uncertainty were the most resonant in some of the more casual moments of gesture and spoken text. Barrington Hinds builds on this in a longer, highly physical monologue. His acrobatic rolls and split jumps unleash the recollections of a grieving son. The distance between the source material and the performance of it is what makes room for the larger philosophical questions around illness and death and allows for levity and humor.

The opening also excels in setting this tone of intimacy, introducing us into the world of the workshops and their cast of participants via the cast of dancers. A formula of transposition emerges as each dancer speaks a name, strikes a posture, and relays an identifying trait that acted as a life story in miniature. Gloria, Frank, Keith, to name a few. Sharp snaps, a batter’s stance, arms flapping free. Mary, followed by swaying hips and circling wrists. Several dancers do “The Mary”—the repetition a conjuring of spirits. But the idiosyncratic gestures could only be human; the distinctive movements of individuals no longer with us living on in the bodies of a much younger generation.

Mak Thornquest and Jada Jenai in “Still/Here” by Bill T. Jones. Photograph by Nir Arieli

A couple days later, Netta Yerushalmy’s “Movement,” lit up NYU Skirball with delightful neon costumes from Magdalena Jarkowiec and a kinetic theory of everything in the dance universe.

Caitlin Scranton begins the ecstatic exercise kneeling in a stark side light, twitching to a set of beeping tones. Like the costumes, Paula Matthusen’s roaming original music and Tuçe Yasmak’s dramatic lighting highlight the episodic nature Yerushalmy’s choreography. Hsiao-Jou Tang enters from around the corner of the stage and as her body flicks and shifts into a rhythm, she joins Scranton in a jump that lights up the clean white stage and background.

Five more dancers arrive in slinking solos, one traversing the stage in a slow, exaggerated grapevine. Simultaneous solos link up in moments of play and highly organized chaos: Burr Johnson and Christopher Ralph serve up a jazz combo, the whole cast coalesces for an all too brief hustle, and in a quiet section, Scranton and Tang hold one leg balances and offer bows from Eastern and Western dance traditions while occupying opposing sides of the stage. A club scene, complete with magenta light, brings everyone into an upstage corner. The music picks up speed, bass thumping, and Ralph captivates in a frenetic solo, but the scene ultimately fizzles out.

Halfway in, I had the sense that this could go one forever: snippets of discrete dances, moments from different eras and cultures, filed one after the other, by tremendous and tireless dancers. While I could have watched this carnival of dance highlights forever, I also began to wonder if and when it would become more than consecutive parts linked through the agility of the dancers. Would this build to something more all-encompassing?

Netta Yerushalmy’s “Movement.” Photograph courtesy of the artists

The short answer is no. “Movement,” was a grand compilation of dance citations rather than an amalgamation of separate dance phrases and lineages. Each distinct stylistic phrase maintained its integrity from the others (for example: twerking did not find its way into petit allegro or a kick line). The synthesis rather, occurred in the individual performers, where imperceptible transitions threaded through the vast stores of their embodied histories: personal and cross-cultural, individual and shared.

While the second half of “Still/Here” left the audience with a spinning and tumultuous image of death, led by an awesome electric guitar solo (played live by original composer and musician Vernon Reid) and fed by a cathartic circle dance, “Movement,” ended with a winding apotheosis. Holding hands the dancers stomped, kicked, conga-ed, and traveled with the alternating coup de pied’s of little swans. A long list of partial credits played for the final minutes as the dancers walked and skipped in the dark, confirming some of the movement references I glimpsed (like Scranton’s typing from “Einstein on the Beach”) and many others that were missed. While I appreciated the thoroughness of the research and process, I’m not sure you need to be familiar with those credits to intuit Yerushalmy’s thesis of “the body as a site of ineluctable knowledge,” just as you might not need to know the names of all the workshop participants of “Still/Here” to feel their presence in Jones’ process.

These dances posit the body as a vast archive, and movement as the conduit for accessing and passing on the multitudes of knowledge we contain. Can we stay open to the heterogeneous nature of that experience? Whatever is left of our collective memory and humanity may depend on it.

Candice Thompson

Candice Thompson has been working in and around live art for over two decades. She was a dancer with Milwaukee Ballet before moving into costume design, movement education and direction, editing and arts writing. She attended New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, graduated from St. Mary’s College LEAP Program, and later received an MFA in literary nonfiction from Columbia University. She has written extensively about dance for publications like Andscape, The Brooklyn Rail, Dance magazine, and ArtsATL, in addition to being editorial director for DIYdancer, a project-based media company she co-founded.

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