Dance
Bill T. Jones' A Quarreling Pair at the Brooklyn Academy of Music

This October, Bill T. Jones and his company were back in New York City, performing A Quarreling Pair at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Jones’s mesmerizing dance theater piece takes as a starting point a short 1945 puppet play by Jane Bowles, in which two sisters incessantly quarrel over their different needs and desires. Using Bowles’s play as a focal point, Jones works with the different styles of puppetry, vaudeville, and postmodern dance to produce a seductive and provocative evening.
If you have seen Jones’s work before, you are familiar with his refined use of sound, color, and space—Jones is as sophisticated in his set design and musical choices as he is in his choreography. Even before dancers have appeared on the stage in A Quarreling Pair, Jones creates evocative atmospheres through glittery lighting and jazzy live music. Then, as in vaudeville, an announcer prepares us for the evening’s acts.
The piece opens with a shadow theater production of Bowles’s play, in which two silhouetted dancers move like human-operated puppets. The puppet show, together with the presentational and entertaining dance acts that follow, brings us into an unusual space in the postmodern dance world. Jones replaces neutral facial expressions with smiles and abstract movement with evocative gestures. And there are tricks on stage! In a particularly humorous dance act, a woman removes a banana and a dead chicken from under her dress.
Jones is known for making dances that explore sexual, gender, and racial tensions, and his choice for a vaudevillian atmosphere in this work acts as a particularly good fit for such issues. In A Quarreling Pair, the performers are at once entertainers and “oddities.” First among them Miss Rhoda, who cannot bear an existence confined to her identity at home, and after leaving her sister discovers the pleasures of the stage as a singer. Misfits like Rhoda and sexually ambiguous characters like La Torita, a Mexican drag performer whom Rhoda falls for, find in vaudeville a space in which they are allowed to be sexy and sensual, where they are able to express their identity in the most flamboyant of ways.
Yet Jones quickly makes the frame of the theater apparent, uncovering the sadder and more serious facets of the demands of performing an identity considered outside of the social norm. In one of the most touching scenes of the evening, after having failed in her singing career, Rhoda, suitcase in hand, slowly crosses the stage in isolation while a giant projection behind her makes her look smaller and more vulnerable than we have seen her yet. As Rhoda’s loneliness grows, the piece leaves vaudeville behind and increasingly moves towards more symbolic images and Jones’s signature abstract movement phrases, bringing us back to the familiar language of contemporary dance.
A Quarreling Pair is at once a humorous and serious, multi-layered meditation on identity and dance. As always, the dancers in the company are exceptionally expressive, extending their energy out of their bodies and through space with precision. Their dancing, together with Jones’s artistic direction, pushes the boundaries of contemporary dance in an exciting and provocative direction, in a piece simultaneously entertaining and thought-provoking.
Contributor
Beatrice BarbareschiBarbareschi is an MA student at NYU. pursuing experimental performance and dance.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

Bill T. Jones Dancing Through Disease in Can You Bring It and Afterwardsness
By Hallie ChametzkyJUNE 2021 | Dance
Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters is a new documentary about Bill T. Joness seminal, AIDS-era work. Afterwardsness, his newest production, reflects on the COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing assaults on Black lives. Viewed together, they offer seemingly contradictory but ultimately profound lessons on dances role in moving through personal and societal grief.

Jennie C. Jones with Ann C. Collins
APRIL 2022 | Art
Perception comes gradually, when the mind is quieted enough for awareness to seep in, and even then, it is never fixed. Mingling visual and aural work, lineage and legacy, Jennie C. Jones: Dynamics infuses the Guggenheim Museum with minimalist abstractions and tonal callings. The first Black woman to have a solo exhibition in Frank Lloyd Wrights iconic rotunda, Jones throws open long-held narratives of art history, expanding the tracings of inspiration and influence to include both Black and female histories. Mining a vein of work in which paintings stand as sculptures, music is rendered in graphic statements, and color becomes a source of light, Joness work throws us off balance, requires us to shift and reposition ourselves in response to her slow reveals. As her gentle harmonics roll down from the oculus, the space itself seems to sway and expand.
Ishmael Houston-Jones with Elinor Krichmar
JULY/AUG 2023 | Dance
Variations on Themes from Lost and Found: Scenes from a Life and other works by John Bernd was originally conceived and performed as part of Danspace Projects Platform 2016: Lost and Found. Its 2023 reprisal continues to explore and recover the legacies of a generation of artists lost from AIDS complications, centering the choreography and writing of John Bernd, a performance artist active in New York Citys downtown dance scene during the 1980s. Bernds piece Surviving Love and Death, performed at Performance Space 122 in 1981, is one of the earliest performance works to address HIV/AIDS, before it even had a name. Co-directed by Miguel Gutierrez and Ishmael Houston-Jones, a friend, collaborator, and caregiver of John Bernds, Variations collages and reshapes his body of work, carrying its spirit into the present.
Jennie C. Jones: New Compositions
By Ann C. CollinsOCT 2021 | ArtSeen
Jones is most at home at the intersection of music and art history, building hybrids of the two while questioning her place within the legacy of the latter: How does the work of a Black woman artist fit into a tradition dominated by white men? Turning music into objects and objects into auditory experiences, she troubles the boundaries of any category in which she might be contained and does so with elegance and control.