"To our next...." A letter from Bill T. Jones and company

Last night, I walked away from Bill T. Jones's A Letter to My Nephew with a palpable sense of the man's unwavering concern and love for an individual as well as an entire community. Danced by the brilliant Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, the work takes inspiration from the life and personal struggles of the choreographer's nephew, dancer Lance T. Briggs. Jones reaches beyond this single relationship--described elsewhere as "complicated"--to embrace the culture and resistance of today's youth as they confront our violent, racist, homophobic society...and themselves.

This New York premiere of this 70-minute work for BAM Next Wave, presented in association with New York Live Arts, will run through this Saturday evening at BAM Harvey.

Jones keeps current--even adding the words "Las Vegas" to his acknowledgments of settings of atrocity, displacement and natural devastation. One feels two realities continuously entwine--the pain of life and the raw energy life offers us to make art and meaning. Jones and his team walk a perilous edge yet craft a meaningful world out of exhilarating energy.

Radiating across the marked-off intersection of performance space, their work blends street, ball and contemporary dance with the ingenious manipulation of a large prop. Movement within the body and among bodies flows with silky sophistication. The dance might be a hospitalized patient's fever dream of turf fights and catwalks in an environment changing so swiftly, so unpredictably, that one must shapeshift in order to survive. The poise and malleability of Jones's dancers--as individuals and as an ensemble--make this idea spring to life. Along with Jones and associate artistic director Janet Wong, the nine dancers contributed to the choreography and are given due credit. Let's celebrate them here, too: Vinson Fraley, Jr., Barrington Hinds, Shane Larson, I-Ling Liu, Penda N'Diaye, Jenna Riegel, Christina Robson, Carlo Antonio Villanueva, Huiwang Zhang.

Original score: Nick Hallett
Live vocals: Matthew Gamble
Set design: Bjorn Amelan
Lighting design: Robert Wierzel
Costume design: Liz Prince
Projection design: Janet Wong
Sound design: Samuel Crawford

A Letter to My Nephew runs through Saturday, October 7 with performances at 7:30pm. For information on other BAM Next Wave events, click here.

BAM Harvey
651 Fulton Street, Brooklyn
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Live Ideas: Trajal Harrell in the house of the spirits

Trajal Harrell performs his solo, The Return of La Argentina.
(photo: Maria Baranova)

In The Return of La Argentina, performer Trajal Harrell--best known for postmodernist vogueing--"walked" Participant, Inc., a Lower East Side gallery stripped of artworks and stuffed with audience members in post-snow drab. The long, white-walled venue had a downbeat, pedestrian air--too few chairs for the crowd, wood floor glistening with tracked-in slush, random doodads tucked around a row of three piano benches clearly reserved for Harrell and his props.

Or perhaps I should say, reserved for the shade Harrell would come to channel--Butoh artist Kazuo Ohno in turn channeling his idol, Antonia ("La Argentina") Mercé, the Argentine, early 20th Century star of Spanish dance. Somewhere in there, also, was Ohno's Butoh co-creator and director, Tatsumi Hijikata, who died of cancer in 1986. It was not only a crowded gallery but a rather crowded seance, too.

The engrossing solo was originally presented in 2015, commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art. Last evening, Harrell performed it for Mx’d Messages, the current Live Ideas Festival, curated by Mx Justin Vivian Bond for New York Live Arts. V, trans-genre artist, designed the 2017 edition of the festival as a presciently timely exploration of "non-binary strategies to approach some of the most vexing and wide-ranging problems our planet is now facing."

Something there is that doesn't love a wall, Mr. Trump,
That wants it down.

What Bond intends to offer with this festival is a free flow of energy and ideas across literal and metaphoric boundaries that no longer do us much good. For Harrell, lately, one such boundary is the veil between worlds. He conceived of The Return of La Argentina as an archiving of Ohno's 1977 solo, Admiring La Argentina. While the audience looked on, he snacked on orange juice, potato chips and, finally, some magical concoction of Greek yogurt and jam to see what would happen next.

Would Ohno make himself present?

He did, Harrell told us later, the proof always being the mistakes that crop up--and a few things did go wrong last night. Which means, in Harrell's way of thinking, things went right.

"If there are mistakes, it means that Kazuo Ohno's spirit is in the room." He tells us this in the middle of performing, and the room suddenly got even more crowded with African, Afro-Atlantic and Native American ancestors who totally get what he's talking about.

Although Harrell takes up this performance hoping to slip behind it, The Return of La Argentina helped me see him better than anything I'd ever watched him do. In the beginning, sensing something about to happen, I turned my head and caught him quietly and shyly entering the space, initially out of view of most of us, barefoot and clutching the ruffled top of a floral Spanish dress against his breast, eventually attempting undulations and haughty attitude, that body otherwise dressed in rumpled black jeans (much like my own) and a blue t-shirt over a long-sleeved black shirt. This guy could not look less like the elegant, charismatic Mercé, and he knows we know it, and that's part of it.

I'm more in touch now with Harrell's transparency. I realize that I've frequently seen him change clothing in front of us, and that that process of costume changing always looks the same--kind of ragged, a little harried, down to earth, another sign of the pedestrian aesthetic of postmodernism, its take on "realness," unified in the Black body of this particular contemporary dance artist. (How "real" is any of this? And why do I always want to use quote marks and assign question marks to things when I'm thinking about and writing about Harrell and the things that interest him?) His straightforward, often unprepared or awkward way with props--like tapping the wrong passcode into a smartphone and having to ask someone for the correct one--is a madness method. Try and fail, and do it right in front of everybody. No cover-up. The body tremors I'd noticed in him years ago and wondered about appear to be constant and, here, add visible texture to the vulnerability of the spooks who pass through The Return of La Argentina.

The performance was followed by a conversation between Harrell, Bond and New York Live Arts director Bill T. Jones. It was useful to hear Harrell articulate his sense of his work here as an act of archiving in which our presence is essential.

"It's a keeper, a space, a record, a context, a conservation," he says. And it's a way of thinking about, overall, my experience of live dance. I am honored to be invited into this house of spirits.

The Return of La Argentina is closed, but Mx’d Messages continues through this Sunday, March 19. Get schedule, venue and ticket information here.

New York Live Arts
219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Thomas O. Kriegsmann to direct NYLA programming

New York Live Arts Names New Director
by Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, November 13, 2014

How about a little less Bill?

Actual listing for Bill Chats

from TimeOut.com, February 13, 2014:

Bill T. Jones sits across noted artists in a series of talks.

Last Sunday evening, I attended Bill Chats: When did the avant-garde become black?--a two-hour panel discussion hosted and moderated by Bill T. Jones at New York Live Arts. Since then, I've largely kept my own counsel as I sorted out thoughts that progressed from ambivalence to outright dismay.

From these "chats" to Jones's ambitious Live Ideas event series--last year, inspired by Oliver Sacks; this time by James Baldwin--it's clear that Jones intends to place his singular mark on the entity now known as New York Live Arts. He's steering it out into broader, deeper, more intellectually heady and political waters and aims to attract a sophisticated audience not necessarily affiliated with contemporary dance. I think good things can come of this for dance as well as for those smart newcomers to the art, although it has the potential to rattle and possibly alienate the more tightly focused folks in our dance community.

I do like this potential encounter and overlapping of worlds; it mirrors my own interests. I'm even more excited about the Baldwin programming for Live Ideas than I was about the Sacks series, but what I saw of Bill Chats worries me.

I'll step out in front of this and just say it: It's not a "chat" if you're hectoring your guests and some of your audience members. It's not a "chat" if you invite the following extraordinary panelists--

Ishmael Houston-Jones
Bebe Miller
Adrienne Edwards
Dianne McIntyre
Charmaine Warren
Ralph Lemon
Brenda Dixon Gottschild

--each of whom is a living archive and then get so caught up in your own button-pushing agenda, your own history, and your own sense of being stereotyped or slighted that you rarely take time to tap the considerable knowledge that your guests possess. That's a Murderer's Row of experience, scholarship and sensibilities just sitting around you, Mr. Jones, hardly utilized.

How useful is this self-declared role of "provocateur"--everything "said with a wink and a 'fuck you' smile," as Jones would have it--in the long run? Curtly dismissing Ralph Lemon's analysis in his opening statement--why? because there wasn't enough "feeling" in it?--was not cool and felt disrespectful. Suddenly putting John Jasperse on the spot, as a white choreographer sitting in the audience, really wasn't cool either. Cryptic shoutouts to the soon-departing Carla Peterson--"I'm doing it right now, Carla!"--sound just ill-tempered. These behaviors don't actually advance discussion of complex issues. They are merely showy and rude.

A chat is also not a performance. A performance is not a chat.

In other words, it is so not about you.

For future Bill Chats, please let the panelists breathe. Give them room to stretch and run. You cannot choreograph their voices, and you should not try.

We show up because we want to hear what they have to say.

Bill T. Jones asks "When did the avant-garde become black?"

Bill T. Jones

Bill T. Jones 

and New York Live Arts

invite you to

Bill Chats

When did the avant-garde become black?

at New York Live Arts

Sunday, March 23, 5pm

In this talk, noted panelists including Ralph Lemon, Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Adrienne Edwards, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Diane McIntyre, Bebe Miller and Charmaine Warren will inquire as to when it became acceptable for a person who defines themselves as avant-garde to also say “I’m black.”

Admission: FREE

New York Live Arts
219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan
212-924-0077
(map/directions)

Bill Chats will be live streamed in collaboration with live streaming startup 2ndline.tv.

New York Live Arts to explore the live ideas of James Baldwin

James Baldwin

As part of The Year of James Baldwin*, a city-wide, multi-disciplinary celebration, New York Live Arts will launch Live Ideas: James Baldwin, This Time!, April 23-27, at its Chelsea center. Through lectures, panels, conversations and programming in theater, visual art, dance, video and literature, New York Live Arts will lead an exploration of the continuing pertinence of this great American essayist, novelist, playwright and social critic.

Highlights will include the world premiere of Nothing Personal, starring Colman Domingo; previews of Carl Hancock Rux's Stranger on Earth and STEW's Notes of a Native Son; the world premiere of Dianne McIntyre's Time is Time; a discussion on Baldwin and Queer Futurity; and a conversation on what Baldwin would say about contemporary America, moderated by festival curator, Lawrence Wechsler.

Click the Soundcloud link below to listen to the January 15 New York Live Arts media briefing for Live Ideas: James Baldwin, This Time!

New York Live Arts media briefing audio (33:04)

Speakers:

Bill T. Jones, Executive Artistic Director of New York Live Arts

Jean Davidson, Executive Director and CEO of New York Live Arts

Lawrence Weschler, non-fiction writer and Baldwin festival curator

Patricia Cruz, Executive Director, Harlem Stage

Rich Blint, Associate Director, Office of Community Outreach and Education, Columbia University School of the Arts

Aisha Karefa-Smart, niece of James Baldwin

For further information on Live Ideas: James Baldwin, This Time!, visit newyorklivearts.org/liveideas/.

*Partner/Collaborators in The Year of James Baldwin include Harlem Stage, New York Live Arts, Columbia University School of the Arts, The Office of Community Outreach and Education and The New School and its Vera List Center for Art and Politics and the School of Writing

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater: Works by McGregor, Jones and Barton

AADT in Bill T. Jones's D-Man in the Waters (Part 1).
(photo by Paul Kolnik)

The Dance Enthusiast has just published my review of the Ailey troupe's program of new productions--featuring company premieres of works by Wayne McGregor and Bill T. Jones and a world premiere by Aszure Barton. Read it here!

Bill T. Jones and Susan Rethorst in conversation

Bill T. Jones and Susan Rethorst: A Conversation in Five Parts

from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage

Recently, two seminal figures of the New York downtown dance world—Bill T. Jones and Susan Rethorst—sat down with Lois Welk, director of Dance/USA Philadelphia, to talk about their distinct practices and the evolution of the field. Though they share a birth year (both were 61 at the time of the interview), the dancer-choreographers represent two archetypal models or attitudes for how to live as an artist in society. During the interview, Jones refers to the French notion of l’artiste engagé, and talks about developing a thick armor to do battle with not only critics but audiences as well. Rethorst speaks of an openness to the world around her, of staying fluid and letting daily experience find a way into the work.

Where ideas live and move

Dr. Oliver Sacks (left) in conversation with Bill T. Jones, Executive Artistic Director, New York Live Arts (photo by Ian Douglas). Jones says of the dance community, "I wish we were more curious in the big discussion."

New York Live Arts is where thinking and movement meet the future. -- Bill T. Jones

For a healthy, viable future for the art of dance in American society, that art must meet its potential public--a public that is increasingly diverse; a public continuously plugged into numerous and growing sources of information and entertainment; a public caught up, ready or not, by issues of climate change, malfunctioning government, ruthless abuse of children and women, the devaluation of labor, the rise and risks of cyber-technology and more real world concerns and disasters.

New York Live Arts' visionary festival--launched this season as Live Ideas: The Worlds of Oliver Sacks, in celebration of the 80th birthday of the great neurologist and author--establishes a toehold for this turbulent world-at-large in one of our city's historic, beloved venues for innovative, contemporary dance. I salute this integration of the outside with the inside and, personally, it tickles me to enjoy the possibility of taking in so much of what has always moved my life--from artistic research to scientific inquiry, from informed citizenship to activism--in one convenient location. The mix--which is not strictly new but is newly presented here at the famously former Dance Theater Workshop--excites me and offers hope.

Some of it is just plain fun: Watching a video of NASA astronauts playfully demonstrating how the absence of gravity radically alters execution of everyday movements, while their very funny colleague, Marsha Ivins, shares her own experiences (panel on Disembodiedness: Body Image & Proprioception) or waiting for steam and F-bombs to shoot from artist Miguel Gutierrez while a philosopher torturously labors to define what dance supposedly is and is not (panel on Minding the Dancing Body). Gutierrez  knows that, when it comes to research in consciousness, dance--a mode of perception, as he defines it--has been excelling at this work for a long time now.

Marsha Ivins, retired veteran of five NASA Space Shuttle missions

Imagine spinning and never getting dizzy. 

Or moving a 700lb object with just a touch of your fingers. 

For more fun with zero g, check this out.

Dance artists have information, strategies and even wisdom that the rest of us could benefit from. Jones seems bent on getting this word out to society as well as making some beneficial connections for the dance field. At times, the dialogue seems a little stilted, a little awkward and even prickly, but as long as the various parties are in the same room, talking, who knows what good might come of it?

On the Minding the Dancing Body panel, choreographer RoseAnne Spradlin spoke of making dances as a way to help people see what is usually hard to see, a purpose that Alva Noë and Colin McGinn--the philosophers on hand--readily identified as the goal of their discipline, too. Later that evening, Donna Uchizono's new dance--presented along with her 1999 trio, State of Heads--illustrated this mission.

Donna Uchizono in Out of Frame (photo by Ian Douglas)

Out of Frame, commissioned for the Live Ideas fest, takes as its inspiration the young Dr. Sacks' observations in 1969 of eighty people who survived the 1920s worldwide occurrence of a brain inflammation called encephalitis lethargica. Working from Sacks' accounts of these "recovered" patients in his renowned book, Awakenings, Uchizono distills the characteristic lingering distortions of body, personality and perception of time and space, even persistent immobility, into a solo performed on a tall ladder in the middle of a bare stage. On its own, this staging says so much--the rarity of the condition, the isolation of those who cannot look or function according to the norm, the extremity and precariousness of their situation even under medication, the mystery of a disease whose cause and prospects for resurgence remain unknown.

The solo is strangely beautiful and bizarre and fascinating; one of Uchizono's initial images presents her hand as if it were the clenched bulb of a carnivorous flower or a slowly rippling sea creature. The piece traps memory and heightened sensations within an altered state in which the body might not be perceived as a stable or singular entity...or even one's own. Josh Higgason's video layers an image of the dancer's body onto her flesh, helping us see what it's like to feel that something is very much, well, off.

Live Ideas: The Worlds of Oliver Sacks continues through Sunday evening, April 21. For information on all remaining events--including the encore of Donna Uchizono's dance program on Saturday at 4pm--click here.

New York Live Arts
219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

They're making it right HERE.

New York Performing Artists Share Inspiration on ‘Made Here’
by Felicia R. Lee, The New York Times, March 13, 2013

Jones and Sacks have big ideas for New York Live Arts

New York Live Arts Introduces Arts and Ideas Festival
by Felicia R. Lee, The New York Live Arts, January 31, 2013

Kyle Abraham awarded residency by New York Live Arts

Kyle Abraham Gets New New York Live Arts Residency
by Felicia R. Lee, The New York Times, November 7, 2012

Talking with Jones on "Fela!" and theater

The Sunday Conversation: With Bill T. Jones
by Irene Lacher, Los Angeles Times, December 11, 2011

Honest Bill

Finding out quite late in the game about the 2nd Annual DOC NYC film festival, I was only able to get to one screening, but I chose well!
 
A Good Man--directed by Bob Hercules and Gordon Quinn is a ravishing and bracing documentary about two years in the making of Fondly Do We Hope… Fervently Do We Pray, the Bill T. Jones masterwork and meditation on the life of Abraham Lincoln, his complexity and his possible significance for American democracy in the current age. As Jones prepares this commissioned piece for premiere at the Ravinia Festival, we're taken behind the scenes. We become privy to his thought processes, his doubts and his often volatile working relationships with dancers and creative collaborators. This is an unflinching, warts-and-all portrait of one of dance's true superstars and geniuses but also an extraordinarily generous portrait of the talented individuals who support his visions, even under heavy fire, and bring them to powerful life.

After watching A Good Man, I tried to figure out why dance isn't the most popular and most rewarded art form in the United States. Okay, maybe it's just me, but who wouldn't want to spend quality time in a theater with these gods and goddesses who are also, as we see all too clearly, real live human beings? That duality--reflected in Jones, as in the Lincoln he was taught to admire--comes across through the sensitive and handsome work of Hercules and Quinn and their Director of Photography, Keith Walker.

A Good Man looks and sounds fantastic on the big screen, but you can catch it on American Masters (PBS) on Friday, November 11 at 9pm ET/PT (check local listings).

DOC NYC runs through next Thursday, November 10, at the IFC Center and New York University, with a fascinating range of programming. Get complete schedule and ticketing information here.

Love what you love. Have courage.

Choreographer Bill T. Jones shares his reflections on 9/11 and its effects on culture and creativity in this New York Times video interview: Click here.

re-Jones/Zane

New York Live Arts has launched its inaugural season with Body Against Body, an exhilarating program of early works by Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, performed by Jones's current troupe members and dance celebrity guests such as Janet Eilber, Vicky Shick, Richard Move and Matthew Rushing. I attended last night's opener, the first of two discrete programs that run through September 25.

Reasons to check in with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company at this juncture are many. Body Against Body revisits conceptual works--such as Monkey Run Road (1979) and Continuous Replay (1977), with its full-on, un-selfconscious nudity and lightly ritualistic accumulation and repetition--that remain startlingly airy and clear in structure and delightful today. The troupe season's title can imply a cluster of meanings--the sensuality of flesh against flesh, the playfulness of adept physical instruments directed by equally top-level minds, the supple and sturdy support of one partner for the other. All of these meanings and values can be found in the works on display here as throughout the best of the art Jones has made as survivor of his personal and professional relationship with Zane, who passed in 1988.

Jones and Zane did the one-on-one format especially right. So, if you can still manage to grab a ticket, be sure to see Monkey Run Road (with the choreographers' casually elegant, harmonious roles taken by Talli Jackson and Erick Montes) and Valley Cottage: A Study (1980/1981) with a rotating cast of partners. Last night's pair included Paul Matteson and Jennifer Nugent, Jones/Zane troupe members and "downtown" dance celebrity artists in their own right. Matteson and Nugent will also appear in Program B's Blauvelt Mountain (A Fiction).

Perhaps, by breathing new life into these historic duets, Jones intends to work some subliminal mojo on any remaining skeptics as he begins his own grand partnership with the former Dance Theater Workshop, host of the original productions of two of these seminal works. It's good to be reminded of where Jones came from, this searching, breakthrough choreographer who now, with Carla Peterson and the rest of the NYLA team, hopes to break down barriers for other artists. His new season should serve as a blessing on NYLA's ambitious venture.

Company performers: Antonio Brown, Talli Jackson, Shayla-Vie Jenkins, LaMichael Leornard, Jr., I-Lin Liu, Paul Matteson, Erick Montes, Jennifer Nugent and Jenna Riegel. Guest artists vary by performance.

With costumes by Liz Prince and lighting by Robert Wierzel


The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company in Body Against Body continues tonight and September 20-24 at 7:30; Sundays September 18 and September 25 at 5pm. Pre-show Talk: September 21 with dance critic Marcia B. Siegel and Bill T. Jones.

Post-Show Talk: September 23 with Bill T. Jones, Carla Peterson, Janet Wong and the dance company

Check the box office for ticket availability: 212-924-0077

New York Live Arts
219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan
(directions)

Knows he can dance. Hates reality tv.

Bill T. Jones: Dance Reality Shows Are ‘Obscene'
by Marisa Guthrie, The Hollywood Reporter, July 31, 2011

New York Live Arts announces new season

What in the world is happening here?

Well--believe it or not--it's sort of an impromptu plein air press conference convened by the ever-resourceful Bill T. Jones in front of New York Live Arts (formerly Dance Theater Workshop, now merged with Jones's dance troupe) but actually in front of an NYFD fire truck.... Wait. Is this getting way too complicated?

Let me start over.

At a morning press conference inside NYLA's Bessie Schönberg Theater, Jones (NYLA Executive Artistic Director) had just been introduced by the organization's CEO Jean Davidson. Jones surprised us by elegantly, delicately dancing and even singing a little as he made his opening remarks. Halfway through, he started to talk about his own troupe's upcoming season but, suddenly, the NYFD ordered everyone to leave the building and assemble across the street!

We had to wait until the fire truck pulled up and the firemen did...something...I have no idea and no one seemed to know what. In the meantime, Jones doffed his shirt, as is his wont, and completed his address to the crowd of press, staff, dance world colleagues and curious passersby. Happily--and to the great relief of Carla Peterson, NYLA Artistic Director, who would have had to shout over street noise--we were soon able to return to the theater.

Truth be told, for the first time, the very idea of New York Live Arts does seem hot enough to warrant the arrival of a truckload of firemen. And it certainly seems dance enough to still the fears of folks who thought that the loss of the name Dance Theater Workshop meant something sinister.

The upcoming season--beginning September 16 with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company--and other NYLA programs rock. I'll drop a handful of names, just for starters: Reggie Wilson, Yvonne Meier, Rachid Ouramdane, John Kelly, Richard Move, Ivy Baldwin, Jodi Melnick, John Jasperse, RoseAnne Spradlin and Big Dance Theater. Over 40 diverse emerging, mid-career and established dance artists will participate in the presenting season or other NYLA programs. NYLA will continue DTW's traditions of commissioning cutting-edge performance, offering audiences opportunities to revisit seminal works and giving artists the chance to develop and show new projects in informal presentations.

The 2011-2013 recipient of a new program--Resident Commissioned Artist--will be Yasuko Yokoshi, the well-regarded, Hiroshima-born choreographer who has worked in New York since 1986. Yokoshi's two-year award includes a salary, health insurance, and support for creation and possible touring of new work. Imagine that! Jones described this as "a new standard for the entire field." Indeed and amen, amen.

"We launched New York Live Arts because we want to instigate change, not react to it," said Jones, later explaining the organization's initiatives as "a leap of faith."

There's much more to learn about New York Live Arts. So, for complete information about the mission, the upcoming season and the spectrum of artist services, click here.

Trust the public

So I'm reading Movement Research Performance Journal on the M15 crosstown to Chelsea. There's an interview with Bill T. Jones about how professional dance absolutely must change to survive. I'm staring down into that strange, typical soup of words, intense energy, blunt provocation and frustrating lack of specificity--and, yes, I do mean typical for both BTJ and MRPJ. But just before the bus pulls into its 18th Street terminus, I get to this passage from Jones:

Are you clear about what you believe and what you make and how you make it? Are you so clear about it that you could actually invite the most stupid person in there and give that person just a little taste of something that's human in what you do and that is not superior. This whiff of arrogance and superiority--believe me honey I have it, big time. And I'm telling you something, I've had to learn, because it sneaks through, that we actually feel, and this is the history of alienation, that somehow we are entitled because we are a privileged and long-suffering elite that is wandering in the wilderness of mediocrity which is the whole world. Now if that doesn't sound like a load of shit, then you tell me. (MRPJ #38, February 2011, p. 5)

I don't care for the descriptive "stupid," but I think I begin to get what he's getting at despite the fragments and tangents.

Jones is impatient for contemporary dance to break out of its cocoon and make both pragmatic and creative connections out there in the hell of other people. That's what he has in mind for New York Live Arts--the new entity formed from the merger of Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and Dance Theater Workshop--and it begins with the individual artist deciding that he or she respects and can trust the public.

Detail of Sarah Sze's STILL LIFE WITH LANDSCAPE (MODEL FOR A HABITAT), High Line Park (c)2011, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

A few steps, a few stairs, and I'm surrounded by the gorgeous, lush greenery and wildflowers of High Line Park, walking its new section. I take photos of a mourning dove alight on an elaborate wildlife sanctuary by artist Sarah Sze. The sculpture provides watering holes, seed feeders and places for resting and nesting. "It's like a mansion for birds," one visitor exclaimed. Yes, now even birdies, butterflies and ladybugs can find an upscale perch in Chelsea!

Detail of Sze sculpture (c)2011, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Above and below: Mourning dove (c)2011, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Above and below: Seen from High Line Park (c)2011, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

I stroll to 30th Street. Though reluctant to leave the flowers, the butterflies, the breeze, the views across this cityscape, I ride the elevator down to 10th Avenue. I'm off to the Sean Kelly Gallery for Robert Mapplethorpe: 50 Americans: fifty photographs "selected by fifty Americans of diverse occupations, ages, races and backgrounds...one from each state in the Union...invited to select a single artwork from over 2,000 images in Mapplethorpe's collection that resonated with them personally." Portraits, still lifes, a wintry landscape...the range of these selections is broad and lovely.

Right away, I stumble upon, like a secret wink meant just for me, a 1985 portrait of--yes--Bill T. Jones chosen by a 32-year-old woman from Birmingham, Alabama, a children's author and storyteller. Jones jumps straight up, his body breaching the frame, rendered headless, and as my mind helplessly starts to read something into this that the white Alabama native might not have considered, I move along.

A 66-year-old grandmom from Vermont enjoyed working through the photo collection with her granddaughter. She chose Horse #5 (1982) and wrote, "I was drawn to all the images of animals. I love animals. These horses reminded me of my farm....Lots of memories and stories came to life through his work."

Her response is fairly common: Lots of these folks found that they could relate to aspects of Mapplethorpe's diverse imagery on a personal level. They share their experiences here. Reading the plaques that accompany the photos and bear the selectors' words and a thumbnail picture of each, I find my heart going out to many of them.

Prior to getting involved in the gallery's project, most of the participants knew little, if anything, about the photographer and his work. Some knew just enough about Mapplethorpe's reputation for homoerotic imagery to be a little nervous about having to view it. Some clearly avoided the erotica when making their choices from among the collection's variety of subjects. Yet these non-experts crowd-curated a beautiful, instructive show, and their reflections on this work demonstrate remarkable perception and insight as well as appreciation for Mapplethorpe's sensitivity and brilliance.

I was moved by the capacity people have to meet art with open minds when given a chance to really look at it and allow it to draw close to them, to search their lives for common ground. No wonder repressive social orders seek to manipulate or destroy art. I was touched, too, by this gallery's trust of the American public, and that brought me back to Bill T. Jones.

I stopped for dinner on the way home and, once again, took out my now-rumpled copy of MRPJ. This time, I turned to "New York's Alright," an editorial by dance artist Eleanor Hullihan and was amazed to read this passage, including her reference to Mapplethorpe's great soul mate, Patti Smith:

Phyllis Lamhut and Patti Smith are two women I admire who in different ways have encourage people to get out of New York and either make work where they came from or where they can afford to live more easily.  We could benefit from decentralizing dance in the states. We can't keep talking about the rest of the country like it is full of idiots who don't understand us if they don't have the opportunity to see what we do. I recently had one of the most positive audience responses from a show I did with John Jasperse in Helena, Montana. Montana? Hell yes. It was not a dance audience but they came and enjoyed and wanted to talk afterwards. This may be a mission for our generation of makers. It may also be a mission for people younger than ourselves. (MRPJ #38, February 2011, p. 6)

Okay, Universe, I get it. Trust the people. Just get the work out there. Spread it around, that "little taste of something that's human in what you do and that is not superior." Just trust. Good for artists to remember. Good for people who write about art to remember, too.

Robert Mapplethorpe: 50 Americans ends Saturday, June 18.

Sean Kelly Gallery
528 West 29th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues), Manhattan 212-239-1181
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NYLA, for your viewing pleasure

New York Live Arts Community Welcome Session

Filmed February 19th, 2011. Co-Presented by Dance/NYC.

The leadership of New York Live Arts: Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and Dance Theater Workshop re-imagined, conduct a panel to discuss the decisions and visions behind New York Live Arts. Moderated by Michelle Coffey