Dancing Plague: Archives of Celebration and Care in Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane's Secret Pastures

Abstract

Following the cancellation of influential contemporary choreographer Bill T. Jones's highly anticipated return to the stage in spring 2020, Jones reflected that COVID-19 was his "second plague." In referencing the AIDS epidemic that upended his career and personal life, Jones located methods of enduring not in the "unprecedented" present, but in the past. This essay considers the irreverent and buoyant Secret Pastures (1984), a work that reemerged as streaming media during the pandemic, as part of Jones's AIDS repertory. I describe how Secret Pastures' artistic and social archives, and the collaboration and friendship among Jones, Arnie Zane, Keith Haring, Peter Gordon, and Willi Smith documented therein, contain crucial practices of queer survival, particularly that of "alongsidedness." The essay argues that contexts for endurance can be found in the allegedly frivolous, glamorous, playful, humorous, and excessive aesthetics of Secret Pastures as much as they can be identified in, and more typically are ascribed to, more formalist, austere, and tonally serious works like D-Man in the Waters (1989) and Still/Here (1994). Modeling a toolkit of perseverance and flourishing, Secret Pastures reorients popular and academic views of minoritarian, particularly Black, and queer art and life as structured through trauma and scarcity. Secret Pastures shows how the onstage performance serves as a context for offstage friendships. Amid the ongoing hostilities of government abandonment, homophobia, white supremacy, and viral attack, art-making functions as a laboratory for modes of relationality that can endure.