Little Comfort

We are torn. We are not usually torn. Usually, when something makes us rather uncomfortable, we use our prerogative as a (unpaid) blogger to ignore it. We have taken great license with our Phillyist byline, in that we write about what we like and think is important; we don’t pick up on the stuff that is out of our league or seems boring to us. Hence you’ll find a lot of arty stuff, charity stuff, and even some sports stuff under the below name. However, today, we are torn.

Who has put us in this state of flux? Bill T. Jones. The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company is performing tonight and tomorrow night as part of Dance Celebration at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts; they are presenting the Philadelphia premiere of Chapel/Chapter, a multimedia work that explores the nature of violence, the media, and humanity. By all accounts the piece is intense; like, really, really intense: dancer Leah Cox was quoted yesterday in the Metro as saying people have been known to leave the theater after only a few minutes. The dancers portray scenes of startling violence. Three “chapters” detail these scenes, one of a random murder of a family of four, one of the murder of a “young troubled girl by her frustrated father,” and one involving an incident at summer camp between two 11-year-old boys. Tough stuff. During the dancing, video projections and use of lighting augment the set of 10 gray squares while Alicia Hall Moran and Lawrence "Lipbone" Redding “read and sing text from the actual criminal dispositions.” Part of the point as we understand it is to force the audience to connect to events that they may normally ignore, or find so outside their own experience that they do not seem to warrant close inspection.

By all accounts we should be all over this: socially conscious dance combines some of our favorite things, after all. So why the tearing? You know, after writing the above, we don’t think we’re going to tell you. No, we’re not trying to be coy. It’s just that perhaps art needs to be given the space to create itself, and since we haven’t seen this piece it seems somewhat questionable to bring other factors to bear upon it. Suffice to say that there are factors involved that make us uncomfortable to the point of distraction, and we’re not sure that would make for a good night. Seeing as how challenging comfort zones and assumptions is part of the point of Chapel/Chapter though, maybe we’re just the sort who should be made to watch it. We’ll have to take the company’s word for it.

Chapel/Chapter
Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company
The Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts
3680 Walnut Street
Tuesday, January 29, and Wednesday, January 30, 7:30PM
215-898-3900

Image Credit: Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company