Dancing Tableaux Vivants

Tonight I went to a wonderful performance and lecture with Bill T. Jones and an English Professor named Arden Reed at the Metropolitan Museum. I brought my class and a few friends of mine. It was an unusual evening that started with an excerpt from a Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane piece called Artful Time: Dancing Tableaux Vivants. An unusually heavy man sat on a stool with his back to the audience, a white sheet wrapped around his waist, and a woman in male-type underpants stood to the right, also with her back to the audience. She had a sheet that was wrapped around her head (I think, now I'm not sure anymore) and flowed to the floor. She twisted it very very slowly, manipulating it in a beautiful way. They both moved incredibly slowly. Incredibly slowly in this hauntingly beautiful way. They were kind of like ghosts and statues at the same time, and there was this thick loneliness that I am beginning to think I see everywhere.

Then Arden Reed and Bill T. Jones talked about stillness and movement and looking, and Arden Reed talked about tableaux vivants. The whole time slides were being shown in the background and at one point they showed this awesome film that was Bill T. Jones dancing, except it was very very slowed down. I mean, maybe I'm remembering it wrong but I think they stretched four seconds of movement into eight minutes. It was creepy and strange watching that degree of slowness, and you could really, really see the shapes the body takes when it moves. It was one of the most eerie things I've ever seen. There was an inhuman quality to it that I can't explain. Watching it was kind of challenging, it produced an actual physical sensation in me and made me slightly lightheaded.

The evening ended with another excerpt from Artful Time, and it was wonderful to see it again. All the talk about seeing, and illusion, and time, and presence and absence, brought me so much more deeply into the piece. Sometimes too much contextualizing and explaining of art makes it less compelling to me, more like, "oh yeah I get it, what next?" But this opened up the experience for me in a way that made me feel graced, if that makes any sense.

Also, the lighting was wonderful. Because it was so still and slow, you looked at the stage very much like a painting (or tableaux, duh!), and the bodies, the drapery and the lighting itself was beautiful on its own.

I also want to add (I know this is getting long-winded and indulgent) that I think Bill T. Jones is a genius. I've heard him speak and seen his company perform before and I truly think he is one of the greatest artists of our time. When he talks about being an artist, about being present to the world - the phenomenal world as a poet I know would say - and to our bodies and emotions, about resisting so much of what is deadening in our culture, I feel inspired in the sense that there is something about living artistically that anyone can attain and which is profoundly important to be aware of, even just as a possibility. His complex and sophisticated use and understanding of narrative, poetry, movement, history, visual art, and memory is just astounding.

Okay, I'm done.