A Gentle History

In “Serenade/The Proposition” (Sunday at Alverno Presents) Bill T. Jones achieves the epitome of that revered artistic gesture – create something that is simultaneously quite specific and also universal. And since the piece is much more than a dance, it permeates every aspect of the experience.
Janet Wong’s video projections are built off of Civil War photographs (Richmond in ruins – the distinctive portico of the Capitol is prominent), but they have been dramatically altered so they might just as well be the landscape of Dresden, Tehran or late-’60s Newark. The music (composed and performed by Jerome Begin, Lisa Komara, and Christopher Antonio William Lancaster) reshapes historical songs (most dramatically, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”) into soaring and ruminative explorations of history. The costumes (by Anjia Jalac and the company) suggest the stark formality of the 19th century, but are embellished with splashes of red among the black and white – a Civil War palette to be sure.

Then there is Jones’ choreography – a perfect vocabulary to explore the meaning of real historical events. Of today’s choreographers, Jones is a master of creating lyrical beauty from everyday, or even iconic, gestures. One repeating figure here is a group of men, moving forward in a tumbling, stumbling unison. It’s a beautiful cluster of bodies with strong vertical and horizontal elements. And one of the primary gestures is a man taking a large step over the outstretched legs of another dancer. It is elegant, propulsive and unmistakably an image of warriors in battle.

Throughout the piece, the iconography of war is in tension with fluid dance. A litany of cities – recited by Jamyl Dobson – suggest the destructive march of an army or a historical pilgrimage. The gentle overlap of history and the here and now – a journey that arrives as the text describes Jones’s arriving in Richmond as a boy in the family station wagon – drives “Serenade/Proposition.” But “drives” is hardly the right word. It holds history at a distance, a question that floats through our 21st-century lives. It doesn’t make claims or demands, but asks us to bring the foggy, and often horrific, memory of the near past into focus. To keep looking back as we move forward.