Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company revives Collage at New York Live Arts

The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company revived and revised a late-1980s work as 'Collage Revisited' and presented it at New York Live Arts on Saturday as part of the Live Artery festival. The piece, originally debuted two months before Arnie Zane's death in 1988 and long absent from the company's repertory, uses a sound score by Charles R.

Amirkhanian and Blue Gene Tyranny. A narrator speaks of Freud's dreams and lectures on the history of modern art, explaining collage as a mode of juxtaposition; by the score's end, recordings of the 1979 White Night riots — when gay citizens of San Francisco protested the lenient sentencing of the man who assassinated Harvey Milk — overwhelm the formal rumination and alter the work's meaning.

Staging choices include dancers selecting and changing their own costumes, with a transition from school uniforms to underwear and stilettos read as liberation. To the sounds of the riots the company runs with windmilling arms, advances from a corner and is pushed back before moving forward and finding community in lined embraces.

The dancer Barrington Hinds, in a suit and tie, acquires a closeted character and engages in both a Twyla Tharp–style duet and a clandestine liaison with Jacoby Pruitt; the reviewer also noted the absence of Zane and of longtime associate artistic director Janet Wong, who resigned in August, and judged the evening's dancing a little sloppy.

Key Topics

Culture, Bill T. Jones, Arnie Zane, Collage Revisited, White Night Riots, Harvey Milk