The choreographer Bill T. Jones rehearsing “Still/Here,” which will return to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The original work was set into motion by a series of survival workshops that Jones held with people facing life-threatening diseases.
Credit...George Etheredge for The New York Times

When Critic vs. Choreographer Ignited a Cultural Firestorm

by · NY Times

It landed like a bomb.

“Discussing the Undiscussable,” a 1994 New Yorker essay by the dance critic Arlene Croce, started off with a sentence that blew the minds of many: “I have not seen Bill T. Jones’s ‘Still/Here’ and have no plans to review it.”

But she did decide to write about the work, which was inspired by people living with terminal illness, including AIDS. (Jones was H.I.V. positive.) In her contentious essay, Croce, one of the finest dance critics of the 20th century, railed against what she called victim art: “By working dying people into his act, Jones is putting himself beyond the reach of criticism. I think of him as literally undiscussable — the most extreme case among the distressingly many now representing themselves to the public not as artists but as victims and martyrs.”

Jones in the 1994 production of “Still/Here” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Behind him are videos of participants in the survival workshops.
Credit...Joanne Savio

“Still/Here,” which premiered in France and opened at Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1994, was set into motion by a series of survival workshops that Jones held with people with life-threatening diseases. (There were no dying people onstage in the production.) Croce’s essay brought fame to the dance and its creator. And by working exasperated outrage into her act, she opened up dance and criticism to the masses.

For Jones, who said the essay was like having scalding water poured on him, it means he and Croce are forever linked. “I don’t want to think about her,” Jones, 72, said in an interview. “But unfortunately she and I are wed. That’s kind of weird, isn’t it?”

Croce, 90, was not available for comment. The art critic Jed Perl, a good friend, said she “has always stood by her view of ‘Still/Here.’”

Has a piece of criticism, much less of dance criticism, made such a mark on the culture since? “Discussing the Undiscussable” was in conversation with the world, not just dance or art. It didn’t matter if you’d ever seen a dance, never mind a dance by Jones. Everyone was talking about it.

“Still/Here,” an evening-length work, returns to the Brooklyn Academy on Wednesday with a new cast, from the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, and for a new generation. Disease and dying — and how mental health fits into both — are less undiscussable than they were back then. When he made the dance, Jones took part in the survival workshops. But his dancers did not. Workshop participants, who were managing life-threatening illnesses, never appeared onstage, though their voices and video imagery became part of the production, which was created several years after Arnie Zane, Jones’s creative and life partner, died of AIDS in 1988.

At the time, AIDS was still stigmatized. The dance world had been — was still being — devastated by the disease. Before Jones began to work on “Still/Here,” he had considered disbanding his dance group in favor of a pickup company of people who were H.I.V. positive. That didn’t get very far. Jones said he knew he was more than that as an artist, and he needed his dancers with him. But he was trying to understand how to live in the world he found himself in. He wasn’t sure if he would live. And he was grieving.

“How can the people that you’re with right now come on this journey, and what do you need to do?” Jones said he asked himself. “I need to sing and dance. I need to hear people talk about the worst days of their life. And I need to know how they’re getting by.”

For Croce there was another layer of “undiscussability” involving “those dancers I'm forced to feel sorry for because of the way they present themselves: as dissed blacks, abused women, or disfranchised homosexuals — as performers, in short, who make out of victimhood victim art.”

She continues, “I can live with the flabby, the feeble, the scoliotic. But with the righteous I cannot function at all.”

The meaning of victim art here is as uncharacteristically murky as Croce’s essay, which jumps from one topic to the next: funding agendas, the preponderance of community outreach and the complicity of a victim artist with her public: “A perfect, mutually manipulative union is formed which no critic may put asunder,” she writes, citing the choreographer Pina Bausch.

Did Croce, the dance critic of The New Yorker from 1973 to 1998, give up on criticism too easily? “Discussing the Undiscussable” didn’t start out to be so extreme. In the introduction to her collection “Writing in the Dark, Dancing in ‘The New Yorker,’” Croce writes that she envisioned the piece running in the humor column Shouts & Murmurs as “a one-pager complaining of trends in performance, some sinister, some absurd, which had the effect of limiting what a critic could decently say.”

She writes that she had been telling herself that the topic of victim art had been “adequately covered” by others; then, she was confronted with “Still/Here.” While she knew her piece would make some people angry, she said she wouldn’t have written it differently, only “taken more time over it and weeded out the embryonic Shouts & Murmurs bits that embarrass me now.”

But there really isn’t much kidding around. She added that she “would have put in a sentence or two about the pornography of atrocity, which often goes hand in hand with victim art.”

The dance publicist Ellen Jacobs, then working for Jones, called Croce’s essay an avalanche. “It was bewildering in a way, because I don’t think a lot of those people even saw the piece,” she said of “Still/Here.” “But they felt such a sense of outrage.”

“Everybody in the world was chiming in on this,” she added.

There was an outpouring of letters, for and against, and more columns in publications including The New Yorker, The New Criterion and The New York Times, where Joyce Carol Oates wrote: “The very concept of ‘victim art’ is an appalling one. Only a sensibility unwilling to attribute full humanity to persons who have suffered injury, illness or injustice could have invented such a crude and reductive label.”

Susan Sontag wrote a letter to The Times in response: “The philistinism that provoked Ms. Croce’s protest is perfectly exemplified in Joyce Carol Oates’s essay.”

As one reader wrote: “Joyce Carol Oates vs. Arlene Croce: the match of the century! The Super Bowl of art criticism!”

At one point, Croce refers to “Still/Here” as one of those “performance-art shockers.” But “Still/Here” wasn’t so jarring or shocking. Uniting movement, video, music and spoken word to celebrate life more than mortality, faith rather than death, it fit in a tradition of dance-theater multimedia work of the ’90s. Some of Jones’s workshops were recorded for a Bill Moyers program, and it’s clear that the movement exercises served as a way to get people to open up about not just their illnesses but about their mental health. In that way, “Still/Here” was ahead of its time.

Above all, the subject matter was meant to be direct. Rosalynde LeBlanc, an original cast member, said: “I remember Bill specifically saying — it was before the whole Arlene Croce thing — that he was very conscious in making this that it wasn’t supposed to be overly sentimental, maudlin, you know, like, pulling out the violins. We are giving this thing manifestation. And this thing wasn’t even AIDS. It wasn’t cancer. It was really a psychological positioning.”

What’s clear, and even surprising to discover now, is that “Still/Here” was — and is — a dance, not dance therapy. “It’s a very formal dance,” Jones said during a rehearsal last month. “In all the conversation around it, that was missed.”

And that had to do not only with Jones’s dance, but with dance period. The choreographer Neil Greenberg, whose celebrated “Not-About- AIDS-Dance” was presented just before “Still/Here” in 1994, found that aspect of the discussion strange: “It’s so hard to raise the profile of dance any way,” he said. “There was all this conversation, and it’s like, Well, could we actually watch a dance? Some day?”

“Still/Here” lives within a structure. For the dancers, it’s beyond rigorous, requiring next level stamina. Jones started out an athlete, and that sense of pushing the body is present.

Building the dance vocabulary was a task-based endeavor, a procedure rooted in the postmodern dance tradition of the 1960s. Cast members learned gestures generated by the workshop participants from video recordings.

The movement, he decided, needed to be extremely formal: It is what supports the emotion in the work. As Jones remounts “Still/Here” with Janet Wong, the company’s associate artistic director, you detect in him a palpable sense of relief. It’s almost as if he is able to see the dance for the first time.

“You do a piece 30 years ago,” he said, “and now you’re facing yourself again?”

And questioning himself, too. After watching a run-through, he said: “I thought, ‘Is it a piece?’ I mean, let’s assume you were not the choreographer. What did you think of what you just saw? And I think it is. I think it is.”

Wong, Jones said, has told him that one of the things that gives “Still/Here” a future is its structure, and the rigor around it. But in the early 1970s, he and Zane, deep into experimentation and contact improvisation, were performing and choreographing solos and duets that opted for spontaneity over structure. “I feel like I’m in a way kind of betraying something,” Jones said about how he thinks now, “because when we were wild and young, we were saying, ‘To hell with orderly architecture, to hell with this, to hell with that.’ That was a whole ethos. And now I’m sitting here saying, I long to see structure.

“Now I think I see how an ephemeral idea, when it’s handled correctly, can actually be alive,” he continued. “Again and again.”

Transcending the time in which “Still/Here” was made is crucial. Croce’s essay damaged Jones, he said, more than he would admit at the time. “I have suffered,” he said. “I have suffered, and I’m a little embarrassed that it hurt me so much. Toni Morrison said, ‘Bill you’ve got to realize stuff like that is written to hurt you.’”

It is only in the past six months that he has found ways to deal with it. “I feel in a way that I think I can stand it now because I’m not my illness,” he said. “I am alive. The work is alive. People who come to see it will see its strength, that it’s well made. I almost feel sorry for her because the things she said in that article — ‘Well, nobody goes to it for the dancing.’ But you didn’t see it, honey. It’s some fierce dancing in it.”

Jones prefers not to say Croce’s name. “I had such a high appraisal of The New Yorker, this woman. I used to call her the Henry James of art criticism. I thought that highly of her. She’s a smart woman. But when she did that, it made me realize she had feet of clay.”

But also, he added, he could sense her passion. “I give her that,” he said. “I have a feeling it might have been the result of misguided thinking, but there was something passionate.”

Recently, Wong encouraged Jones to read Maurice Berger's book “The Crisis of Criticism,” a 1998 collection of essays about the purpose of arts criticism, which includes “Discussing the Undiscussable” and critics (Oates, Homi K. Bhabha) responding to it. “I was so blinded by my feelings,” he said. “I was kind of, ‘Oh, that’s what was hurtful to you then, but you don’t feel that way now,’” he said of himself.

He can parse her sentences more clearly now: “That’s what she was saying?” he said. “Well, that’s kind of ridiculous! Why at that time weren’t you able to brush it off?”

Jones credits his new way of seeing things to the combination of remounting “Still/Here” and working on himself. His life as an artist hasn’t been easy, he said, even though he’s loved it.

“Since I began I was like” — he clenched his fists at his chest, wincing — “I had something to prove. Holding my breath.”

He said he’s been holding his breath for years. “You know, my madness,” he said. “Do I have victimhood? What am I holding? I do Qigong every day, and that’s very good. Where the breath goes, the movement follows.”

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