Weekend Update

Our weekend was dominated by two performances of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company at the Columbia Dance Center. We've had the great fortune to be in the right place the right time as far as Bill T. goes. We think we first saw the company in 1984, the year is approximate, but the impact of the performance is not. I know that Freedom of Information was on the bill, a complex, dense work, as I remember it, with a steel or aluminum set which defined the space. I was blown away. We've subsequently seen the company at the American Dance Festival (including Bill's awesome cameo in Ruby Shang's site specific piece at the Duke campus--Bill, gorgeous, in a tiny red bikini, emerging from nowhere at dusk, and then diving into the lake to end the piece), the Walker Art Center, (but damn, damn, somehow missed the moment of Uncle Tom's Cabin in the Promised Land) and several performance at the Wexner Center, including Still/Here, which was co-commissioned by the Wex-Plex and feature several citizens of Columbus in the videos.

The company looks impossibly young. We missed the pre-performance talk, but someone told us that Bill reflected that he was now old enough to be a parent of the dancers. Both performances we great, but the highlight was Blauvelt Mountain (A Fiction). Originally performed by Bill and Arnie, the piece is now being performed by variable casts, and we saw Shaneeka Harrell and Aya Janeen Jackson. (We think, they changed the cast by verbal announcement. Amazing. I thought Ayo (I think)looked like a small, female, Bill T. What deltoids. They totally had it.

We also made our first trip to the Chicago Botanic Gardens. The linked web site doesn't do it justice. Beautiful, thoughtfully arranged, and aside from the proximity to the I-94, incredibly peaceful. A chilly day, the leaves were turning, great.