Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dk4vv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T14:59:57.478Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Allegories of Passing in Bill T. Jones

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2012

Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

As we move we change. How could it be otherwise? The direction and consequence of change is far from assured. Dance inscribes movement in the world as a practical accomplishment. It legibly affirms, even if ephemerally, fleetingly, that some immediate difference has been made when the outcome of movement in life might still be in doubt. As a means for registering what movement can be, dance shows us how we pass from one state to another. It does this literally, as bodies configure their realms of space and time, and allegorically, as a touchstone to what it means to be passing through this world. Dance reports on the art of passing, telling us how to dwell amongst so many departures and arrivals. It also instructs us in passing as self-representation, convincing us in performance that it is dancers we see. Such a lovely tale, this. Yet in a nation of immigrants, all are compelled to move, but not all get to pass. Those who lived by the land were evicted in the name of property. Those who were designated property were affixed to the land in bondage. Others worked off their debts of passage. Still more were promised mobility from migration.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Congress on Research in Dance 2008

References

Works Cited

Albright, Ann Cooper. 1997. “Embodying History: Epic Narrative and Cultural Identity in African American Dance.” In Choreographing Difference: The Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance, 150–77. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.Google Scholar
Daly, Ann. 2002. Critical Gestures: Writing on Dance and Culture. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.Google Scholar
Dent, Michelle. 2005. “Checking the Time: Bill T. Jones's American Utopia.” Drama Review 49 (2): 2447.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foster, Susan L. 2002. Dances That Describe Themselves: The Improvised Choreography of Richard Bull. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.Google Scholar
Goldman, Danielle. Forthcoming. I Want to be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hacker, Jacob. 2006. The Great Risk Shift. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Jones, Bill T. 1995. Last Night on Earth. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
Martin, Carol. 1996. “High Critics/Low Arts.” In Moving Words: Re-writing Dance, edited by Morris, Gay, 320–33. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Martin, Randy. 1998. “Overreading The Promised Land: Toward a Narrative of Context in Dance.” In Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics, 55106. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Murphy, Jacqueline Shea. 1995. “Unrest and Uncle Tom: Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company's Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land.” In Bodies of the Text: Dance as Theory, Literature as Dance, edited by Goellner, Ellen W. and Murphy, Jacqueline Shea, 81106. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Thompson, M. J. 2005. “Sincerely Dancing: Bill T. Jones Sleight-of-Hand.” Drama Review 49 (2): 7586.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zucker, Adam. 2000. Free to Dance: Go for What You Know. Volume 3 of Dance In America.Google Scholar