The sorrow and the hope of a dancer: remembering Still/Here twenty-five years after the première of Bill T. Jones’ dance piece

Abstract

North American choreographer, Bill T. Jones started his activity as a professional dancer in the 1970s. Jones practices and thinks about art and creativity explicitly in its direct relationship not only with his own but larger communities life experience. Still/Here (1994) is a piece that, precisely, marks a milestone in the context of society and the art of the end of last century, particularly by addressing a relevant topic that has informed the experience of many people at that time in Euro-American society arising from HIV and AIDS crisis. In this paper, starting from the premise that reflexivity (Turner 1987) is a characteristic of theatrical dance, focusing on the modes of representation of emotional experiences on Jones’s work, and relating it to pieces created before and after Still/Here – namely, D-Man in the Waters, Achilles Loved Patroclus and Ursonate – intend to argue that these emotional expressions have a motivation that, beyond the psychobiological explanations (Lutz and White 1986), is only understandable if we consider the position (Rosaldo 1984) from which Jones lives his experiences and constructs his vision of the world, and a meaning that is only perceived in the light of the “biographical context” (Gell 1998) of the choreographer.