Saturday night saw the eighth of nine performances of the Bill T. Jones and (the late) Arnie Zane Dance Company's "Chapel/Chapter" at Jacob's Pillow's Doris Duke Studio Theatre in Becket, MA. The tense marriage of dance, live musical accompaniment, and light projection from the rafters made for a complete performance, drawing on the multiple media to affect the audience from all three sides.
Preceding the performance was a "Pillow Talk" on the piece and on Bill T. Jones' life of choreography (accomplishments include a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship and a 2007 Tony Award), framing the work in the societal context of the prison system.
The prison system was indeed represented rather drastically, with the introduction to the performance, while the audience was filing in, consisting of dancers in full-body, inmate-orange jumpsuits meandering around the white, oval-shaped dancefloor with eyes closed, only changing direction when swiveled around by dancers in blue populating the perimeter, acting as the prison guards, all against the blood-red backdrop of the small theater. This may have been commentary on the judicial system's total control over criminals, disallowing any leeway after but one mistake or even accident. Even the ushers made the audience to feel as if they were trapped within a strict institution, commanding performance-goers to fill up pews and cramp in close to strangers (this may not have been in the script).
The piece itself was a whirlwind of acrobatic, natural movement, oftentimes finding the dancers very close to or on the ground itself. This worked wonders for the premise, which followed fragments of three stories of death from beginning to culmination, each involving a murder of some degree. The murderer was always at a greater height advantage than the victim, who was consistently cowering or suffering at the instigator's feet.
The three stories involved a man's completely unattached murder of a whole family, the Sotos, as part of a sexual fantasy, a father accidentally murdering his trouble-making daughter, and a fragmented killing of one summer camper, Cameron, by another. Each story was broken up into pieces over the course of the performance, not one story being fed to the audience as a whole but serially, the viewer learning more about each individual crime every time its story came back. This made for much repetition, overlapping, and distortion of initial notions about the crimes.
Not one element was of more importance than the next, the cellist (Christopher Antonio William Lancaster) and guitarist/mouth horn extraordinaire (Lawrence "Lipbone" Redding) dictating the pace of the dancers' movements as well as providing welcoming intro/outro sound. The projection onto the dancefloor from the ceiling was also of great importance to the piece, providing appropriate visuals such as a hopscotch outline for the Little Girl and a pool of water in which Cameron's lifeless body floated.
This intriguing, relevant dance superbly captured the essence of its themes, all the while doing so through extremely athletic and expressive dance. The intimate setting was nearly perfect for such a piece, drawing the audience in close enough to watch the beads of sweat take form, multiply, and soak the dancers, leaving streaks of wet on the floor after their final bows.
Ian Nelson, Collegian Staff
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