YBCA to Present Bill T. Jones' West Coast Premiere of ANALOGY/DORA
MacArthur Genius and legendary choreographer Bill T. Jones, and the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company return to Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) to present the West Coast premiere of Analogy/Dora: Tramontane, a portrait of perseverance, resourcefulness, and resilience. This new performance is based on an oral history Jones conducted with his 95-year-old mother-in-law Dora Amelan, a French-Jewish nurse and social worker and survivor of World War II. Analogy/Dora began 12 years ago as a gift Jones created for his longtime collaborator and husband, Bjorn Amelan, and his family.
Dora Amelan's harrowing, touching and inspirational story is broken into approximately 25 episodes that became the basis for choreography, narrative, and music. These episodes chronicle her early family life, her mother's death as the Germans were marching into Belgium, her journey onwards to France and the loss of further family members during the war. Arriving in Vichy France she encounters the internment camps of Gurs and Rivesaltes, where she devotes herself to working for a Jewish underground organization.
"Based on our incredible experience in 2014 presenting the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane company's 30 year retrospective, and in honor of our deep institutional respect for Bill and his colleagues, we could not pass up the opportunity to commission and present this new work," says Marc Bamuthi Joseph, YBCA's chief of program and pedagogy. "The company aesthetically represents the values that YBCA aspires to: A sense of history as provocation, a feeling of intimacy captured at sublime scale, and a desire to stoke our collective humanity."
Mimicking the interview format between Jones and Amelan, Analogy/Dora unfolds in multiple levels of transformation. The threads of Amelan's narrative sometimes parallel the choreography, sometimes overlap and sometimes exist in an enigmatic counterpoint.
The nine dancers of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company move seamlessly between dancing, speaking and singing in the evening length work. The simple passing of a microphone signals taking on one of the roles of the "interview." Long-time collaborator, Bjorn Amelan's décor is constructed and deconstructed by the company to suggest a hotel, a railway station, barracks and less easily defined spaces.
The performance is accompanied by haunting songs of the wartime era, from the quietly beautiful words of Charles Trenet's song Le Soleil et la Lune, and the evergreen Parlez-moi d'amour, with some of Schubert's most evocative lieder, Nachstück, Alinde, and Nähe des Geliebten, and original music composed and performed by Nick Hallett.
Analogy/Dora: Tramontane is a YBCA co-commission with Peak Performances, Montclair State University, New Jersey; additional commissioning support provided by Dancers' Workshop. This presentation marks Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company's third partnership with YBCA. Previous presentations have included Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company 30th Anniversary Exhibition (2013), Time: Study I in collaboration with CounterPULSE (2013), A Rite, a collaboration with SITI Company (2013), and Chapel/Chapter (2007).
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