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Published on 5/17/08
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Bill T. Jones’s evocative, poignant Chapel/Chapter may offer the most dramatically intense 70 minutes of any dance event you’ll see this year. In performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art through Saturday 12, three stories of peril propel the work: They’re repeated, rearranged, remixed and poetically reimagined in a way that brings visceral urgency to age-old issues of morality, judgment, crime and punishment.
We caught up with the Tony- and MacArthur Award–winning American choreographer over the phone while he was on tour in Mexico. Jones says that the work’s genesis occurred when he was asked to create a site-specific performance in a 19th-century water pumping station called the Gatehouse in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood. It had been refurbished into what Jones describes as “an abandoned gothic cathedral,” featuring a glass floor with water streaming underneath. Although the work has since been performed in other spaces, this initial location had a strong influence: Water became an important theme throughout Chapel/Chapter.
One of the three stories in the piece comes from one of the members of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. “I like to use my dancers’ artistic abilities [other than dance] during the creation process,” Jones says. “I read some writing samples of a dancer who I think could be a great writer.” For Chapel/Chapter, he asked the dancer to delve into a childhood memory about a waterfall and two young friends. While one boy witnessed, the other leapt into the waterfall, perhaps to his death. In rehearsals, “I asked [the dancer] to tell us his story as other dancers moved around him,” says Jones.
Given the word “chapel” in the title and the churchlike scenic design by Jones’s partner, Bjorn Amelan, one wonders if Jones wishes to communicate any specific religious beliefs via the work. He demurs, saying his idea was that the work takes place in an environment evoking both “a sacred place and a courtroom.” Amelan’s design also resembles a basketball court: The stage space is divided into ten gray squares topped by a semicircle. The lighting design, by Robert Wierzel, sometimes frames and illuminates one or two of the squares to spotlight the haunting solos and duets.
The stage in Chapel/Chapter thus becomes a site for spiritual challenges, gatherings and testimonials enacted by the ten dancers, who each embody Jones’s signature athletic style with lush elegance, skill and fervor. Beneath the dancers’ bodies, dramatic video projections of text, numbers and flowing water by associate choreographer Janet Wong recall the floor of the Gatehouse.
The piece’s soundscape adds to the emotional impact: Contributions from Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR), Alicia Hall Moran, Christopher Lancaster and Lipbone Redding, are complemented by recordings of tolling church bells, folk songs and Buddhist chants.
Another theme of the work is the relentless grip the media can have on our daily experience. Jones says the news amplifies fears that we’re surrounded by terror and violence, citing how rains, floods, trials, abuse, terrorists and murder are just a channel-click away from our living rooms. He calls this “information-voyeurism.” “You’re alienated and do not have to go anywhere to see anything. All you have to do is turn on your television,” he says.
Jones hopes to counteract this paradox of the well-informed yet frightened and isolated American: “This was an attempt to build an instant community, to draw people together, to ask questions about important things.”
Read into Chapel/Chapter through Saturday 12 at the MCA.
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