BWW Reviews: Bill T Jones and Kathleen Chalfant Link Chance Composition and Shared Histories in New Version of STORY TIME

Friday night at New York Live Arts saw the premier of Bill T Jones' Story Time #36 Kathleen Chalfant - Amble or Career. The work paired the always enigmatic Jones with Tony nominated actress Kathleen Chalfant in 70 minutes of shared histories and dance.

The evening takes its inspiration from John Cage's Indeterminacy (1958), a work in which Cage sat alone on stage reading an unbroken stream of one-minute stories to a small audience. In the same vein, Story Time is staged by chance procedures, giving the audience a unique performance experience... no two evenings of this work are the same!

The concept is simple: 70 collective stories by Jones and Chalfant were chosen at random during a Friday afternoon run-through with accompanied dance vignettes for the Friday night performance. The vignettes featured some literal pantomimes of the stories, but most are abstractions and excerpts from Jones' choreographic catalogue. A fan of the Company since I began dancing at 13 years old, I found myself recognizing key moments of seminal works making appearances within the evening. Valley Cottage Study (1980), We set out Early, Visibility was Poor (1997), and the thrilling pas de duex from Continuous Reply (1977),performed with brute force by Talli Jackson and Antonio Brown, all made special appearances. Besides the afternoon run-through and outlines of the night's order written down on the sides of the wings for dancers' reference, the piece was a live experiment in chance. Without a completely codified and over rehearsed structure on which to rely, the dancers had to be mentally ready and flexible for whatever was handed to them within the show. They were vulnerable and earnest, and we, the audience, went willingly along for the ride.

There is a clear nod to history in Story Time, not just in the ghostly appearances of past work, but in Jones' and Chalfant's recognition of loved ones and now passed influences. Chalfant referenced her brother Allen's battle with cancer in several stories, relating her preparation for her award winning performance in the original production of Wit. Jones made several nods to director and choreographer Geoffrey Holder, and both of Jones' parents, all of whom passed away earlier this fall. The stories are heartfelt but matter of fact. One anecdote puts Jones' sister in a precarious position with their Alzheimer's-afflicted father in his hospital bed as he attempts to use the bathroom with minimal motor control (you fill in the blanks on that one). The stories are raw in their honesty. Jones isn't afraid to be candid for the sake of fleshing out the humanistic side of the work.

I was fortunate enough to attend this production during a talkback night. Let me say for the record that I could probably listen to Bill T. Jones talk for hours. He is unpredictable but articulate and non-pretentious. One of the uncomfortable things about talkbacks, in my experience, is that there always seems to be that one self-designated expert audience member who can't help but criticize the work. In this instance, one audience member explained to Jones that he did not understand the randomness of the dance, and it might have made more sense if there was a more clearly drawn trajectory for the piece. Jones replied with such grace to this "question" by explaining that the work, at its core, is about the randomness of life. He noted "when we leave this theater, we all assume that we will go home and go to bed but we all know it doesn't always work that way." It is the spontaneity of life that connects us all. This is the crux of John Cage's compositions, another ghost overlooking the dance. How do elements of the work coexist within the change of procedure? The piece puts stories of death and stories of rehearsal under the same consideration. At the end of the day... we are all related.

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