Review: Sacred and profane share stage in Bill T. Jones' 'Chapel/Chapter'

Rachel Howard, Chronicle Dance Correspondent

Saturday, October 20, 2007

"I have to get out of here," a man said as he fled Bill T. Jones' "Chapel/Chapter" at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on Thursday. Soon, another person slipped out, then another. "It's too disturbing," a woman whispered to her friend.

There are things we don't want to see, but ought to. The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company's YBCA engagement, running through Sunday, is one of them. An icon of American dance since the 1980s, Jones is no stranger to walkouts, but Thursday's were different.

Bill T. Jones finds strength from real-life tragedies
“How do we live with the disturbing and incomprehensible news items we encounter every day?”

The choreographer Bill T. Jones asks this question in a recent phone conversation, recalling what inspired his riveting work “Chapel/Chapter,” ....

“I thought how most of us are never fully able to express our horror at the barrage of terrible things that transpire,” Jones says, “or to acknowledge our own dark thoughts and impulses.”

Making sense of the senseless through dance
The central question at the core of Bill T. Jones’s potent “Chapel/Chapter” seems to be “How do we carry on with all the horrors our media-saturated culture throws in our faces every day?” It’s not a question Jones and his company pretend to answer - he’s more interested with getting us to do the soul-searching.

Hard stories - Bill T. Jones at the ICA....
Bill T. Jones has always loved double meanings. Chapel/Chapter, his hour-long work about crime and redemption, splices three harrowing life tales into a theatrical environment that beguiles and distracts and makes claims on your energies and doesn’t give you any easy handholds on morality. ... Conceived and directed by Jones, Chapel/Chapter is beautifully crafted by a long list of collaborators in the expansive multimedia style of postmodernism that he’s used so effectively in his earlier works.