The Brooklyn Rail

History of Collage debuted in May 1988—a month after Arnie Zane died on March 30, 1988, of AIDS-related lymphoma. Originally staged at New Contemporary Masters Festival at City Center, Collage Revisited, performed at New York Live Arts as part of the Live Artery festival, honors Bill T. Jones and Zane’s last collaboration nearly forty years later. The “legacy project” retraces the company’s lineage and carries Zane’s influence into the present.

“Dreams Freud dreamed. Or dreams Freud dreamed Freud dreamed.”

These words begin in darkness as a constellation of small string lights cast dappled shadows across the stage. Cricket chirps blend with increasingly garbled dialogue as dancers cut horizontally across the space, rapidly building momentum. Moving on and off stage in swift bursts, the dancers form overlapping duets, trios, and quartets. Spanning the space’s entirety, these group phrases share a fluid movement quality with sharp edges. Their varying tempos create a feeling of simultaneous yet distinct timelines or scenes. With each reentry and constant costume changes, the performers inhabit different worlds and characters. Barrington Hinds is the only unchanging role, in a black suit and black sneakers throughout the forty-minute piece. The rest of the company switches between preppy sweaters, flowy dresses, red lingerie, lace slips, fur coats, and plain white briefs.

There is hardly a moment of stillness throughout the duration of Collage Revisited. The performers sustain precise forms, luxurious extensions, and direct focus. The music becomes unintelligible, plummeting the audience into its dreamscape. Beyond the score’s inclusion of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, Collage Revisited encapsulates the chaos of the unconscious, at once recognizable and nonsensical. Characters disappear and reappear unexpectedly and flit between vignettes. Humor shapes the piece’s dreamscape through facial expressions, exaggerated movement, and comically unexpected nudity.

The score by Charles R. Amirkhanian and Blue Gene Tyranny includes distorted recordings of the 1979 White Night Riots (also included in History of Collage). Layered with audio of more recent protests like the 1991 Crown Heights Riot and 2020 George Floyd protests, the more distant and recent pasts form one collage of history. The dancers in this section move in a larger group, embodying urgency and vigor. Their force throughout the piece never wavers, even as, toward the end, the piece ebbs to a slow moment of contact as the company forms a line, hands pressing shoulders.

Collage Revisited is intensely cinematic. The kaleidoscope of overlapping scenes nods to Arnie Zane’s background in theater and photography, which preceded his passion for dance. In an interview, Bill T. Jones describes being grateful that he had the “the form, the dancing … to focus the grief” for his romantic and artistic partner during the weeks between Zane’s death and History of Collage’s debut.¹ Collage Revisited explores dreams as a pastiche of past and present, of real and imaginary, of fantasy and nightmare. It plays on the surrealist form, materializing Zane’s legacy as a choreographer and reminding us that his influence—along with the generation of artists lost to AIDS—is resolutely inextricable from the present.

Story/ emanates from Jones’s 2012 Story/Time, an exploration of John Cage’s Indeterminacy as a choreographic framework by fusing storytelling with movement. Story/ weaves dance and music, which is performed live by a string quartet. Though contained in different boxes—a grid has been transposed onto the marley, and the quartet sits in a square upstage left—the two mediums inhabit the same plane and converse throughout the piece. The phrases expand and contract along with Franz Schubert’s String Quartet No. 14 (“Death and the Maiden”), at times echoing the subtle, reflexive movements of the musicians.

Story/’s gestural choreography, prolonged moments of contact, and audible outbursts make way for loose, buoyant movement: a reprieve from the unrelenting rhythm of Collage Revisited. The performers linger, seeming more relaxed. Even their costumes are casual athletic wear. The slower pace of Story/ allows for drawn out emotions through reactive facial expressions and intense focus. Like Collage Revisited, the piece employs sweeping locomotive pathways, shifting groups, repetition, and alternating orientation. Movement consumes the entire stage. Full of leaps, jumps, and weightsharing, Story/ defies gravity playfully. The dancers toss green apples, which seem to represent objects of desire. The presence of the fruit gratuitously emphasizes Story/’s playfulness, and feels crowded on an already full stage.

Collage Revisited and Story/ exhibit the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company’s ability to mold and adapt choreography over decades. Nodding to movement patterns and formations consistent across the company’s repertoire, both pieces fill the stage to the brim and immerse the audience in their worlds.