NEW YORK—Choreographer Bill T. Jones is a tall, broad-shouldered man.
He can seize what he wants from life without petitioning for help. Yet, he does not believe in self-sufficiency.
Some of the most poignant moments in the works that his Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company began presenting on Tuesday, at the Joyce Theater, show a tall, graceful person like the choreographer in a position of open-hearted supplication, arms outstretched and waiting for an absent partner to complete the embrace.
Shayla-Vie Jenkins plays this role in the heroic "D-Man in the Waters," which caps an evening of revivals, the first of two exquisite programs accompanied by the Orion String Quartet. When Jennifer Nugent exits brusquely, Jenkins stands in a frozen profile, reaching for her. No hair-pulling telegraphs Jenkins’ despair. We sense the neediness in her patience, and the humility when, finally, she lets her arms drop and ambles slowly in pursuit.
LaMichael Leonard Jr. is the one who gets dumped in the program of new works, including "Ravel: Landscape or Portrait?" and "Story/." The second dance derives from an earlier piece called "Story/Time," and even the title strangely misses its other half. Once again, Nugent is the wild one cradling Leonard on her knees and then decamping upstage, all feistiness and independence. She leaves him smiling, his arms raised like a baby expecting to be picked up; and it’s a relief when Nugent changes her mind and returns.
These little dramas are over quickly, our attention carried off by the intricate, boiling movement. The duets matter, however, and not just because their veracity anchors these formalist works, but because the need for warmth is essential to Jones’ enterprise.
Jones says his work is building a community from individuals of disparate backgrounds. So in a male trio like a puzzle of flying limbs, Erick Montes Chavero bursts thrillingly between his fellows and a dancer ducks just in time to avoid a concussion. Especially at high speed and in close quarters, these men need to collaborate.
More obvious are the ensembles in which everyone clasps the arm of the person next to him, forming links; or the moments when dancers touch one another gently. In dramatic tableaux—fainting, crawling or leaning ruggedly into the wind—this crew hauls itself into the future. They couldn’t go there alone.
The new works, "Ravel" and "Story/," make this point more elegantly than "Continuous Replay," a dance in which naked and stamping, dancers of all sizes, shapes and colors defy prejudice with their solidarity. "Ravel" is oblique, set inside an empty box spackled with lights that resemble the patterned wallpaper of a room painted by Vuillard, the lights spilling over the proscenium and then retreating. The dancers take turns watching one another, and we watch them searching for subtle clues of heartbreak.
Jones has eliminated the text from "Story/Time," placing the dances on a Cartesian grid to highlight their abstraction. We can measure them here, flowering within borders or sprawling across them, yet the true virtue of this company is how beautifully its parts fit together.
Robert Johnson: firstname.lastname@example.org