Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company in “Still/Here” (2024). Photo by Maria Baranova, Courtesy New York Live Arts.
It’s a basic principle of directing theatre that when two people are on stage and one of them speaks, the audience will probably watch the one who is listening. The opposite is true of dance. When two people are on stage and one of them is still, usually you watch the one who is moving. So what happens when the dancers are also speaking?
…felt less about the inevitability of death than it did a deeply researched thesis that dance is fundamentally about observing the act of being alive.
“Even today there is a tension around getting dancers to speak on stage” said Bill T. Jones, Co-Founder and Artistic Director of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, during the pre-show conversation. Appearing one night only at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center (a previous performance was cancelled due to the snow), “Still/Here” is a remounting of one of Jones’ most well known works, originally staged in 1994.
It’s impossible to discuss “Still/Here” without acknowledging the uproar that greeted its premier. Jones, a black, gay, openly HIV-positive dancer and choreographer was no stranger to controversy. Much of his work which preceded “Still/Here” was overtly and intentionally political. “There was a belligerence about insisting on being who you were on stage,” said Jones. He described having to walk a gauntlet of screaming protesters just to get into the theatre for his 1990 work, “Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin / The Promised Land.” “I felt that gauntlet as a badge of honor,” he said. “After that, I was thinking about what we all have in common, and we all die.”
“Still/Here” was created out of an extensive, movement research process over two years. Jones and his company conducted “survivor workshops” for terminally-ill people suffering from AIDS, cancer, cystic fibrosis, and other diseases. The original score for “Still/Here,” composed by Kennith Frazelle, prominently features audio recorded of participants describing their experiences during those workshops. Footage and still images of those individuals also make up a large part of the projected, multi-media environment of the work, and their language served as the basis for the dancers’ dialogue.
In the article, “Discussing the Undiscussable” which has since become the textbook example of unethical arts writing, Croce wrote: “I have not seen Bill T. Jones’s ‘Still/Here’ and I have no plans to review it… by working dying people into his act, Jones is putting himself beyond the reach of criticism… The most extreme case among the distressingly many now representing themselves to the public not as artists, but as victims and martyrs.” She continues at some length in a diatribe about the politicization of art that is clearly recognizable in contemporary culture as a rant against ‘woke.’ This is not surprising considering that Croce first arrived in New York as an employee of William H. Buckley at the National Review.
Croce’s article instantly elicited condemnation across much of the dance industry and from most of the prominent cultural critics at the time. The premier at Brooklyn Academy of Music sold out, and “Still/Here” became one of the most iconic works of politically embroiled dance to come out of the 1990s.
So now, three decades later, how does the revival of “Still/Here” resonate in the present? In his director’s note, Jones said “the piece is and is not that work from 1994…it isn’t that the movement, ‘the steps,’ stay true to 1994, but the hearts, the minds and understanding of the issues informing the work cannot help, but be different.”
As a choreographer, Jones has a masterful way of blending modern dance and ballet vocabulary. It’s an aesthetic vision of contemporary dance that both influenced and foreshadowed much of what was to come in the following decades. In “Still/Here,” he also has an incredible and non-cinematic way of splitting your ability to focus. It’s impossible to watch a screen and a dancer simultaneously, but it’s also impossible to watch two completely different dance phrases on opposite sides of the stage at the same time. Often choreographers will frame these moments so that it is clear where your focus should be, but Jones diffused the focus across the stage. You could see “Still/Here” two or three times and still not have seen it all.
In other ways, “Still/Here” felt like a defining work representative of its era. The incorporation of screens—both wheeled around by the dancers and, at times, suspended from the ceiling—was cutting edge when the work premiered. But in an era where projection is ubiquitous in theatre, it was a reminder of the work’s history. The original photos and footage from the survivor workshops were that much more poignant with their displacement in time. The animated pulsating heart that appeared thematically across multiple screens felt like an artifact from the era of VHS and incongruous in a multimedia work in the digital age.
The wings in the Kay Theater had been pulled up for “Still/Here,” revealing the backstage space. With its multitude of elements, I found that my eyes going to where the stillness was—to the dancer watching the dancer speaking, to the dancer offstage sitting on their stool sipping water. The dancers in the Bill T. Jones Company often employed a technique where one dancer will cue other dancers who cannot see them by exhaling loudly. From the orchestra level you could hear them listening to each other. In the end, “Still/Here” felt less about the inevitability of death than it did a deeply researched thesis that dance is fundamentally about observing the act of being alive.
Running Time: Two hours 20 minutes with one 20-minute intermission.
Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company “Still/Here” ran February 5, 2026 in the Kay Theatre at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, University of Maryland College Park, 8270 Alumni Dr, College Park, MD 20742. For more information about the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and New York Live Arts please go to their website. For more information about upcoming events at The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, please online.
