Members of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane & Co. troupe were sitting around a hotel in sunny Clearwater, Fla., in 1988 when Arnie Zane had a funny idea:
Wouldn`t it be a stitch to do a piece at the Brooklyn Academy of Music casting an overweight black opera singer as the harried, escaping Eliza from
”Uncle Tom`s Cabin”?
The image of a corpulent diva leaping her way across blocks of frozen river, singing at the top of her lungs, cracked up everyone in the room-a familiar talent of the talkative Zane. ”We could call it `Eliza on the Ice,` ” Zane joked. ”Yeah, and there`s sort of a reference to Eldridge Cleaver`s
`Soul on Ice,` ” someone else said.
Bill Jones, the handsome black choreographer and now lone artistic leader of the troupe since Zane`s death three later in 1988, recalls a brief discussion of the multiple meanings of the title. ”We all had a good laugh,” he says.
Five years later, while there`s certainly some humor in the imposingly titled ”Last Supper at Uncle Tom`s Cabin/The Promised Land,” the full-length, nearly three-hour epic is anything but a joke. It`s easily the most ambitious and daunting work undertaken by the Jones/Zane troupe, and arguably one of the most densely imagined and ambitious works ever attempted by a medium-sized dance company.
”Uncle Tom,” which will arrive here March 11, 13 and 14 at the Civic Theatre, promises to be a swirling ocean of artistic and social exploration. Dance, music, drama, forensics, town-hall pageant and even quasi-revival, it begins with a kind of cartoon choreographic romp through Harriet Beecher Stowe`s novel, touches on the archetypal and stereotypical roles of its black and white characters, and then gradually explodes into religion.
That aspect of the piece features an actual local community religious leader in onstage debate as well as a chorus of local citizens, many without any dance background, selected in advance in each location, in an all-nude finale-a segment billed as a rousing affirmation of societal hope and philosophical acceptance.
Leonardo da Vinci`s painting ”The Last Supper,” as both Christian emblem and familiar velveteen icon is one of the work`s older aesthetic devices, just as rap music, delivered by a troupe guest artist singing of his 15 years in the federal penal system, is one of the newest.
The work blends late `60s happening, post-modern allusion and kitsch and Zane`s wry humor. It`s also a forum for the wealth of challenges Jones and his group, who collaborated with him on the work, see plaguing the U.S. today and threatening religious faith: racism, sexism, homophobia, and the AIDS tragedy. ”This is a complicated work about differences-racial, sexual and class-and how we can work through those differences and move to another place,”
Jones sums it up. ”There`s a lot of anger, a lot of violence and at the same time there`s a strong sentimental streak. It`s a work that attempts to deal with my own personal history, and that history interfacing with social history and religious yearning, that is, a pursuit of something to believe in:
faith.”
”Uncle Tom” is also a highly personal document. Zane, who was Bill T. Jones` life partner, as well as business partner, died of AIDS in 1988. ”I wasn`t sure for a time I wanted to go on living myself,” Jones has said. Jones takes the role of Job in ”Uncle Tom” and enters into improvised debate onstage with the cleric from the community. Participants have ranged from black revivalist preachers to women Episcopalian priests.
Jones` own mother, a onetime migrant worker whose fundamentalist religious tradition infuses the personal background of the work, is one of five guest artists in the company, addressing, at each performance, her son`s HIV-positive status. But the work goes well beyond Jones` personal suffering, he says:
”The bulk of black faith is based on this notion that the world is a veil of sorrow, full of agony and pain. There`s not gain in this world, but in the next. Job has universal resonance for Jews and gentiles, white and black. His story relates to the sophisticated and the uneducated. How can we live with people dying and with suffering?
”People have hit on Arnie`s passing and the whole scourge of AIDS, on my personal sadness, but it`s bigger than that,” Jones continues. ”It`s also,
`What can we believe in and what do I really love?`
”Da Vinci`s `Last Supper` was a favorite painting of Arnie`s, and I think he even wrote about it as an art history major,” recalls Jones. ”But it`s also an ironic joke, a reference to kitsch and to similar paintings of JFK and Martin Luther King. When Arnie died, we could have gone in any number of directions. I think it`s mainly a matter of my grappling with the various parts of the title that sent the piece in the direction it finally went.”
Jones and his New York-based company began in workshop in November 1989 and unveiled ”Uncle Tom” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music a year later, in December 1990. Working with his troupe of 10 players and jazz composer Julius Hemphill-who, with his septet, travels with and performs the mostly original score live at each performance-Jones incorporated everything from heated discussions about the work`s cultural and social issues to actual biographical references from the players themselves.
”I asked myself, what, for instance, does the figure of Eliza in Stowe`s novel mean to me? It happens to be one of the most persuasive images of the late 19th Century, one that shows up repeatedly in painting and drama as well as her novel. Here Eliza is, perched on these huge blocks of ice, a young octoroon woman riskily poised between the horrors of slavery and the unknowns of freedom. What does that image mean to women and men now?”
The figure of Eliza, for example, which started as a joke, became a five- part carousel. Each of five dancers, one of them male, takes the role of Eliza, each using the character for a personal symbolism:
Eliza is black, at first, danced to a recitation of an actual speech delivered by escaped slave Sojourner Truth, ”Ain`t I a Woman?”; one of the
”Elizas” is a white Jewish woman whose dance reflects her personal relationship with Jones and his relationship with the Jewish Zane; and the final ”Eliza” is a flamobyant, effeminate, high-heeled black man, whose life between two sexual poles makes him socially as lost and tossed about as Eliza. But the most intriguing element in this complex work is its final section, ”The Promised Land.” More than 100 Chicagoans auditioned for the production, and 46 were selected by Jones` rehearsal director Valerie Williams at the Dance Center of Columbia Collge.
”In the past, we`ve had everyone from an Iowa kindergarten teacher, who was afraid the nudity might cost her her job, to an 83-year-old man in Washington, D.C., who was dying with cancer,” says Jones. ”He didn`t tell us of his condition, and in rehearsal I kept thinking he didn`t have the musicality. But there was something about his determination that made me keep him, and when I learned later that he had died, I understood what it was.”
How does all this spring from Stowe`s much simpler classic?
”Abolitionist fiction was based on religious belief,” Jones says. ”Stowe wrote a novel about slavery because her beliefs as a Christian found slavery unacceptable. In it, she delineates many things, including the interior life of white and black people, men and women. This kindly, uneducated old black man, Uncle Tom, she sees as the epitome of her faith.
”My personal test was losing my friend, losing many friends. I can`t accept this. I don`t, as a contemporary man, believe in heaven after life. So what do I believe in? We don`t get answers just sitting around, but in the world. I`m finding my own answers. I get a kind of ecstasy that comes over me in doing this work and in interacting with the people in it, getting strength from watching them live and suffer.
”The best possible performance would boast a microcosm of Chicago on stage at the end, every sexual preference, race, background and age represented. There are lines of people kissing, but some who aren`t kissed. There are handshakes, only some are ignored. The nudity begins partially, and then becomes the rule. I want it all to have the directness of my mother`s prayers, that kind of ecstasy and hope. It`s messy, sprawling and
contradictory.”
Jones has not performed the work in a while, and does so here as a result of a year`s worth of campaigning by Chamber Music Chicago, which is sponsoring the Civic Theatre engagement.
”It`s hard to keep doing it and maintain the fervor. It should be like an outdoor sculpture by Christo. The true essence lies not just in the work, but in the dialogue of people in the community and within the institution-even in the rehearsal process, asking the Chicagoans to do the nudity and helping them decide that it`s appropriate.
”Ideally, when you see it, you should see somebody up on that stage you actually know, so that you feel the special investment that goes into it. The kindergarten teacher in Iowa told me afterward that it changed her life.”
Jones, who, between ages 5 and 18 ”did my share of fruit and potato picking” while traveling with his migrant parents, adds, ” `Uncle Tom` isn`t just about my risks, but all of theirs, and the audience`s, too.”
