Healing through dance

For a couple weekends there I watched Olympic ceremonies rather than an online movie. So today I got back to watching a movie. This one is a documentary, shown by the Detroit Film Theater. It is Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters. The movie is 94 minutes and can be seen through DFT through Saturday and probably other art theaters beyond that. Choreographer Bill T. Jones created the dance D-Man in the Waters. It won awards when it premiered 1989. It is still being performed. In 2010 the dance was licensed for general use. The credits listed 25 schools and dance companies who have performed it. There are a few parallel components to this documentary. First is the story of the creation of the original production in 1989. We see discussions by the original dancers reflecting on the experience. Second is a much more professional and higher quality video of the dance done a few years later. Third is a dance troupe of Loyola Marymount University recreating the dance just a few years ago under the direction of a woman who had danced it with Jones. Jones (black) and Arnie Zane (white) were a gay couple. Zane was a photographer and started photographing Bill’s dancing. Soon Arnie took up dance. Once they were performing as a duo they formed the Jones/Zane troupe. It was mixed race, gay and straight. A little community. Then AIDS struck. And Zane caught it. The company was around him when he died. The ambulance crew refused to carry the body out, afraid they might catch it. The dancers wondered whether Jones would want to continue the troupe. Instead of dropping out Jones and the troupe created this dance to help mourn and heal. A good part of the dance was created through improvisation. Jones asked the dancers to express themselves through movement, then they picked out the things they liked best. The final product was not really beautiful, instead it is highly athletic. Performing this dance was their therapy. There was a D-Man. He was Damian, a gay man in the troupe. He died of AIDS just three months after Zane. A dancer joined the group to take over from Damian. It didn’t take long for the new guy to realize he got the job because the previous guy was close to death. At the opening of the dance Jones and Damian improvised a brief moment for Damian, who was quite sick, to appear on stage. The students in the LMU troupe didn’t know much about AIDS. So there was lots of talk about what are your issues? What matters to you? How do you make the audience care? How do you take the original troupe’s message about AIDS, that by golly we’re going to keep living as much and as long as we can, and apply it to your own world? How can you bring that to the performance? Jones visited LMU to talk to the students about those kinds of things. There is a three minute excerpt of the dance by the Jones/Zane troupe on YouTube. Alas, I didn’t find a full performance there. I wish a full performance had been included in the movie.