, dubbed Downstage @ the Mann, with an added black curtain at the stage’s edge completing the enclosure. Sophisticated light projections flicker and move across the stage floor, amplifying the message. When a spotlight on a dancer suddenly turns into a black circle, effectively erasing a person, you feel it.is above all a piece of social justice theater, and Jones acts as a kind of sage poet on its behalf. “Revolution is not a onetime thing,” he says, echoing writer-activist Audre Lorde.
Elsewhere, and densely packed, the synergies were elegantly constructed and potent. Bright, agile images of text and human faces move across the stage. The design by Elizabeth Diller and Peter Nigrini didn’t just provide a changing dance floor, but one that often interacted with the dance. Original music by Nick Hallett, a small choir, and a substantial contribution of other sound design — combined with the tight “black box” configuration — made the Mann, and the outside world, disappear.
All the better to focus on the dance, which, both in its individual and ensemble work, was stunning in seamlessly drawing on traditional ballet moves as well as modern gestures. Jones moves bodies around the stage like sculptures — even nonprofessional ones. He carried the sea-of-humanity idea into the end of the work, where a few dozen dancers became a tight, bubbling whirlpool.
Surely one of the most arresting moments comes near the middle of the piece, where a projection turns the entire floor into an ocean. It’s a breathtaking image, but also vast and desolate, and raises a troubling ambiguity. Whom have we left behind in the here and now? Beauty and horror don’t contradict or mitigate each other in Bill T. Jones’ world. Often they simply coexist on a knife’s edge, raising the hope or fear that someday one may convert the other to its cause.
InquirerPeter Whatever ...