A Study in Contrasts

Jones, Bill T.
Elizabeth Zimmer and Susan Quasha, eds.
Body Against Body: The Dance and Other Collaborations of Bill T. Jones & Arnie Zane
Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1989

Dance is often a study in contrasts: finding rhythm in silence, movement defined by stillness, the literal body creating an abstract narrative. The book Body Against Body: The Dance and Other Collaborations of Bill T. Jones & Arnie Zane attempts to capture something about the contrasts between Bill T. Jones and his long-term collaborator, the late Arnie Zane, and how these contrasts play out in their work: “to capture something about their lives, to record their work in modes other than dance, and to embody a very particular process: the emergence of art from collaboration” (preface).

In words—excerpts from interviews, journals, poems, reviews—and images from Arnie’s photographic archives and from many others who documented their work and their lives in the early days, Body Against Body maps out the relationship between life and art. It is an especially fascinating map as the personal relationship between the two men and their fundamental beliefs are completely interwoven into their art.

On page 16 there are informal photos of Jones and Zane from 1972 and 1973—sweet, over-exposed, candid photographs of them in their early twenties, in the early days of their relationship. One page and nearly 10 years later, the portrait by Paula Court is more formal, weighted by artistic and personal maturity.

“The astonishing thing about their collaborative relationship is not that it has produced so much stimulating choreography, but that it has produced anything at all. The aesthetics of the two artists could not be more at odds. Bill T. Jones operates from the premise that his feelings are of value, that he wants to make room for them in his dancing. ‘life is a vale of sorrow,’ he has said; ‘if I can get on stage and reveal my inner life, it would be valuable’…Arnie Zane is image-driven, a photographer first, using even the fluidity of contact improvisation as ‘an image from which you could make movement’” (18-19).

Bill Katz, who worked with the duo designing sets and costumes talks about collaboration:

“There are at least as many ways of collaborating as there are people working together…none have had the dynamic that Bill T. and Arnie occasion. Partly, it occurs because there are two of them. They always have two ideas, two ways of seeing, two ways of doing, at once. Yet, somehow, when work begins to flow, they pass ideas, movement and support seamlessly from one to the other so that the and in Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane becomes the fulcrum…concerned both with a new vocabulary for dance and an urge to communicate, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane & Company (again the emblematic ampersand) have created dances both confrontational and tender, each as real as if it were a whole landscape and climate, untranslated, untranslatable, and unique” (55).

Exploring that landscape in Body Against Body is a wonderful treat. As a teaching artist, I love the photo of Jones conducting a children’s dance workshop in 1977 (58). It looks like a million workshops I’ve taught through Lincoln Center Institute. But, where he took kids in the context of his work! Wow!

The next image is from a performance, Everybody Works/All Beasts Count, with neighborhood children in Binghamton. It is strange and mystical—on a run-down suburban street, kids with papier-mâché masks and long black robes run into place or stand suspended in time, in contrast to Jones’s instantly recognizable physique. (Even turned away from the camera with a giant bird beak on his head, you know him.) It is a potent image, all the more powerful because of the young performers; all the more haunting for the lack of audience on the deserted street.

Not only did Jones and Zane collaborate with each other, they collaborated with performers in their company, other dance artists, visual artists, composers, film-makers and writers. From page 126 to page 142 is a “Chronology of Premieres: 1971-89.” These two were always creating new performances, collaborating with friends (Lois Welk, Jill Becker), leading artists of the day (Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer), and their dancers.

It is inspiring to look at dance and dance performance, the most ephemeral of art forms, and have it be fixed in time and space, from so many different points of view. “This volume documents the story so far of a pair of careers. It illustrates a very American story, in poetry, prose, photography, and the naked data of a choreographic chronology. It represents a beginning” (116). And we all know everything is possible in the beginning.

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