So I recently read Bill T. Jones book, Last Night On Earth. Actually, full disclosure, I've almost read it - the end is proving really tedious for me. This happened to me one other time, when I read Eldridge Cleaver's Soul On Ice - holy crap was the first 2/3s amazing... and then, it was like blah blah blah.... anyway. Neither here nor there.
A professor of mine, and someone I'd like to say I collaborated with (but maybe more accurately, was directed by... maybe) asked me to create a video that could be used to help guide your average person (aka not very liberal, open-minded, perhaps homophobic) through the book. Bill does speak with a great deal of candor about his sexuality, discovering it and living it, as well as other things. Before I go much further, let me just say, I am having some strange thoughts lately. Perhaps I'm in some kind of artistic adolescence, as I've just recently started to regard myself as one, and this could be a result. In any case, moving forward - after pondering how I would approach this task for quite some time, I felt I simply could not do it. First of all, if people weren't so concerned with lying to themselves about their own observations, thoughts, and feelings in order to fit societal expectations, very little explanation would be needed for dear Bill's writing!
But here's the other thing - I don't think it is possible to explain a person. I go through my thoughts and come across ideas and conclusions and musings and daydreams and think, brilliant! and No way is anyone else going to really grasp what that was about. So this is where art comes in, right? You get to take these wild thoughts that are so intangible and make something with them - probably still intangible on some level, but wholly and incredibly tangible as well, even just on a baseline sensory (sight, sound, touch, smell, etc...) level. And send people off into the night creating their own magic, weird, indescribable ideas.
In any case, I didn't at all know how to go about explaining Bill T. and his book. I found it pretty simple, extremely candid. There is no way to help people through the fact that one of the first times he realized he was gay was when he saw his own brother's hard penis when he was sleeping. Oopsies! But such is life, right? And it just sounds so dirty, so outside what is okay socially - but I'm thinking, he didn't say he wanted to fuck his brother, just that the sight of a penis made him aroused and that caused him to realize something. That sounds like puberty to me! Meh. People don't like to be honest about how they function, where things are discovered and all the strange curiosities there are out there. It's not easy, not the way we're all conditioned, but still. I don't think I need to break this down for anyone.
Now here's my problem currently with Bill T. Jones. I read his book (mostly), as I said, and I loved it in the beginning. The storytelling, the subtle way he describes moving/learning through life, his love with/for Arnie... and then all of a sudden it becomes a book which is all about describing, in great detail, the pieces he's created. It went from being about who he was, where he came from, to what he's done or is doing. Now, his work seems amazing, and he's certainly created really cool, deep, politically and socially relevant pieces, but I do not need a Laban notation of each one (exaggerating). It's like Arnie died and all he had left to talk about was the work, there was no more person/life/soul to share. I found it extremely boring and extremely depressing. I read quite a bit of this too, and it did make me want to see the pieces, but it did not make me want to keep reading about them.
Further, I went to check out his company's website, which is actually new york live arts, as the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane dance company has merged somehow with Dance Theater Workshop - in any case, I checked out the dancers in his company. Wow. I mean these are some impressive backgrounds... serious pedigrees. We're talking BFA's from Julliard, danced with Martha Graham's company, featured in Dance Magazine, on and on. I found this so disappointing! Here is this man, who didn't really even start technical dance training until he got to college, was in many ways self-taught, who's boyfriend/love/partner in art and dance really never trained as a dancer, who went on many wild hippy journeys through space and time and contact improvisation, and made amazing art. Just did it out of passion and with like-minded, experimental people. And here he is perpetuating the same old dance status quo. It's depressing! Is that what happens? You gain success, get old, and hire dancers who have crazy technical/classical training to dance your art? Stop collaborating? Stop the journey? I feel like I want to meet him and say, Bill, what in the hell is going on here? Talk to me buddy. When did you get so hoighty-toighty?
Maybe I don't have the full picture - I'm certain I don't. But I feel pretty sure that something changed there, just as the course of the book changed. Maybe it happened when Arnie died. Maybe it did. I don't know. But I think I always rather focus on who I am rather than what I'm doing. The who creates the what, you know? And there's so much more there to hold on to, to care about. I hope I can always make it about my who, not my what.
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