Spring Awakening - Susan Reiter

"Blind Date "

“Blind Date”
Choreography and Direction by Bill T. Jones
Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company
Lincoln Center Festival
LaGuardia Concert Hall
New York, NY
July 19, 2006

by Susan Reiter
copyright ©2006 by Susan Reiter

“’Blind Date’” is dense visually, sonically, textually,” Bill T. Jones writes at the end of the program note for his latest work. He’s putting it mildly. Inspired by contemporary events and trends, filled with references to honor, valor, progress, tolerance, patriotism, it practically overflows with ideas, and its sprawling, not always clearly focused action seems ready to overflow even on the vast stage of LaGuardia High School’s Concert Hall.

Multiple screens — narrow and wide, square and rectangular, hanging high and low, are layered throughout the space. They feature video images and dense text, often definitions of words that play a pivotal role in the piece’s formulation. One smaller one, hanging high above, offers an unending parade of human faces — all ages, all types — throughout the work’s 80 minutes. The dark backdrop, when the screens do rise enough to reveal it, features chalklike outlines of further squares, circles and rectangles.

The busy, segmented stage picture reflects the multitude of ideas, and the immediacy of the concerns, behind “Blind Date.” It’s very much a piece of this time and place, grappling with issues our nation faces in the post-9/11 era, in a time of a dubious war requiring seemingly open-ended sacrifice. One can feel the urgency behind the work in ways both good and bad. The juicy, bold, vigorously athletic dancing of the company — both in individual moments and in massed ensemble sections — delivers its own moral force. The dancers are a richly diverse group, but also a true ensemble, exhibiting a great deal of trust and risk-taking. Much of their movement is sharply accented and rigid, but several solo moments shift into a more liquid, luscious vocabulary. One sequence that stands out has them arched backward in a “bridge” pose, somehow managing to bounce up and down from there. It looks wild, angry and dangerous.

Jones is very much a presence, anchoring the work’s opening and closing moments, in his guise as a man desperate to stop smoking that it takes on a the tone of a religious quest. We first see him in an undershirt and pants, smoking, as he greets us with “I know what you’re thinking,” and promises he’s on a mission to quit, as he moves — still with his uniquely deft grace — through some basic yoga poses. Already our attention is being divided; in addition to the busy screens, there is another dancer slipping in and out of patches of light, in front of and behind screens, singing snatches of national anthems — ours, “La Marseilleise,” another in Spanish.

For much of the time, Jones is in a dark business suit, which turns him into an ominous, looming presence. When he is paired with a tall, proud man in military fatigues (Andrea Smith) and they alternately struggle or join in a party-like jive, they seem intended to represent the corporate and military forces calling the shots in contemporary America — separate, untouched by the others around them. A recurring mention to “Fourth Generation Warfare” — both in narration and in text on the screens — addresses the increasing uncertainty of today’s hostile encounters. The role of the military is most blatantly addressed in a clumsy section (seemingly intended to be darkly humorous) in which one dancer dons a gigantic cartoonish duck head and capers around as we hear the tale of “Richard, a Sitting Duck” — a ghetto teenager, encouraged by his father to take a demeaning job as an on-the-street mascot for he fictitious Quack-a-Dack Burgers. He’s supposed to gain “ a sense of purpose and discipline. He then becomes an all-too-easy target for the military recruiters, and by the end of the work is a solemn, handsomely uniformed soldier lying within a rectangular outline that clearly represents his coffin.

Jones seems quite enamored of the “sitting duck” motif — one screen seen during much of the work featured a row of ducks like those one would find in a carnival game in which people try to “shoot” them, and as the work gets darker and more frantic in its later stages, two quite ugly but not at all menacing flat duck figures hand and sway above the stage. They have cracked seems and bloody spots and clearly represent, however awkwardly and unsubtly, the way Richard’s innocence has been preyed upon, and the misguided toll that violence takes.

Jones’ singing of an 1815 Irish ballad, in which a mother laments her son’s return from war with his legs shot off, further drives home the point about the price paid by soldiers, and is somewhat ironically juxtaposed with on-screen definitions of “progress” and tolerance.” Later, there is a respite from the allusions to harsh, violent events when the lean a lanky, wonderfully supple woman performs an exceptionally fluid solo as we hear (presumably) her voice describe what would constitute a perfect day. In this case, the multi-tasking of attention that Jones requires here must have failed me; I recall none of what her day involved, but retain the memory of her striking, beautifully modulated dancing.

There is an admirable sense of purpose, and an important concern with making art that resonates with the times and challenges our assumptions, behind “Blind Date,” and the dancers’ vivid performing and ensemble strength communicate their own moral message. Jones avoids, for the most part, a didactic tone, but in the course of its substantial duration, the layering and overlapping comes to feel overstuffed, as we are asked to assimilate and process too much information, much of it thrown at us in a theatrically flaccid way. “Questioning is, in fact, the content of the work” states Jones’ program note, but the questions here are not posed in a manner that can engage and fully involve us.

Photos:
First: Shayla-Vie Jenkins and Bill T. Jones in "Blind Date." Photo: Paul B. Goode.
Second: The company in "Blind Date." Photo: Stephanie Berger.

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"Blind Date "