Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones Contemporary American Performance and the Racial Past by Ariel Nereson (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones Contemporary American Performance and the Racial Past by Ariel Nereson Carl Paris Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones Contemporary American Performance and the Racial Past. By Ariel Nereson. University of Michigan Press, 2022. Hardback $85.00, Paperback $39.95, E-book $39.95. 278 pages. 22 illustrations. Bill T. Jones is undoubtedly the most written about, publicly vocal, and highly decorated choreographer of recent decades. Ariel Nereson’s Democracy Moves adds an important new perspective to that renown with its focus on Jones’s acclaimed trilogy, Serenade/The Proposition (2008), 100 Migrations (2008), and Fondly Do We Hope . . . Fervently Do We Pray (2009), commemorating the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth (commissioned by the American Dance Festival, the University of Virginia, and the Ravinia Festival). Identifying herself as a white critic, a dance historian/historiographer, and an assistant professor of dance at the University at Buffalo, Nereson states that the book takes its title and subject matter in part from questions that Jones asked himself in conceiving his trilogy: What does history mean to us? What does dance mean? What can dance do? These questions formed the basis upon which Jones reimagined Lincoln’s historical legacy as “the heroic emancipator” in ways that acknowledged him also as a man of flesh and desire who was lover and spouse to Mary Todd Lincoln, and explored how that reimagining might implicate alternative understandings of democracy, freedom, and the racial past. With Jones’s project as a starting point, Nereson proposes to show that “dance as history and historiography holds the potential to address . . . [that] [End Page 90] racial past as a legacy of modernity’s violence,” and thus offers “a site of repair for minoritized and specifically Black people” (11). Nereson also broadens this purpose by exploring how “artists as public intellectuals” and the aesthetic-political praxis of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane (BTJ/AZ) Company’s “Lincoln repertory,” as she calls the trilogy, intertwine with postmodern discourses around Black aesthetics, representation, and social equity. Nereson’s scholarship is impressive, comprehensive in its research, and intricately interdisciplinary, drawing on concepts from dance, dramaturgy, critical race studies, and, quite prevalently, performance studies theory. Although deeply probing and highly engaging, however, the text’s abundant interweaving of high-theory concepts, citations, and dense terminology might at times obscure or overshadow connections between the theoretical and descriptive aspects of her analyses. Each of the eight chapters foregrounds important features of BJT/AZ’s reportorial whole, ranging from Jones’s creative, funding, and touring concerns; to ethnographic and critical theory ideas around Black aesthetic and kinesthetic practices; to Jones, the artist and activist. The author explores these aspects in relation to aesthetic-political tensions surrounding Jones as a Black, postmodern/queer choreographer who has maintained a racially and ethnically diverse company since his personal and artistic partnership with Arnie Zane in the early 1980s. Nereson notes Jones’s career-long and sometimes shifting resistance to mainstream categorizations of Black dance and representation, on the one hand, and his nonconformity to—but staunch participation in—dominant-culture, postmodernist dance orthodoxies on the other. Taken together, Nereson argues, these factors inform how we understand the ways in which critics and audiences perceive BTJ/AZ’s work as well as how we track the ways that Jones functions (or does not function) ethically and creatively within Black/white representational discourses. In her introduction, Nereson posits how one might think about the Lincoln repertory within a network of Black radical praxis. First, in connecting the Lincoln works with Barack Obama’s election as signaling a supposed “post-raciality” and the recognition of Jones’s artistic and cultural contribution at the 2010 Kennedy Center Honors ceremony (which Obama attended), Nereson theorizes a notion of “oscillation” that locates post-raciality and post-Blackness (a nonfixedness of identity and representation) within the network of Black radical praxis. Her aim is to articulate oscillation as a practice of “in-betweenness,” an aesthetic/kinesthetic mode of ordering the past that offers “reparative” (liberatory) potential for the performer and spectator. While forceful in her aim, Nereson succeeds most in affirming the pervasive complexities surrounding any endeavor to link...