Notes on Passing
Reflections on Bill T. Jones’ Survival Workshops and choreographic piece Still/Here
Anjali Emsellem
There is an art to spinning words so that they are always already against the monotony of voice and for the polyphony of political speak.
—Billy-Ray Belcourt, History of my Brief Body, 2020
For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun? And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides?... When the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.
—Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, 1923
When I dance with you, I am the moved mover.
—Fred Moten, The Little Edges, 2014
Still/Here was a performance innovated and choreographed by Bill T. Jones after he lost his lover and collaborator Arnie Zane to AIDS. When The Advocate, a mainstream gay press, interviewed Jones after Arnie’s death, they asked, “How do you cope with grief?” “Locate your passion, find out what you love, and give yourself to it,” Jones responded. Somewhere in that conversation, Jones’ mentioned that he was HIV positive. In his 1995 book Last Night on Earth, Jones writes about the experience of grief, fear, and connection coexisting: “How do I deal with fear, anger, and pain? How can I find the strength to love, plan, create? How can I defeat the perception that I am an abnormality, cut off and doomed? To find answers, I would go to the widest, most varied group of travelers along the same road.” Two years before, Jones had conducted what he called Survival Workshops across the country: movement based workshops for participants ages 11 to 74 who were facing or had faced life-threatening illnesses, and many of whom shared Jones’ diagnosis. “You know how the old song goes—Lord I want to be ready—I said this is getting ready,” Jones offers.
In the Survival Workshops, Jones asked questions and the participants responded in gestures and dance: “What do you love?”, “What do you fear?”, “Take me to the end of your life,” “What’s the room like?”, “Who’s there?”, “When that part is over, what happens after?”. Jones then carried the gestures and verbalizations from these workshops to the choreography and score of his piece, Still/Here, performed by the Arnie Zane Dance Company in 1994. I first watched the journalist and political commentator Bill Moyers and filmmaker David Grubin’s documentary about this choreographic work—from workshop to performance with interviews of Jones in between—in my bed in March, with my pets by my side and the pandemic taking its first monstrous steps.
There is an expansiveness to language: it both reaches for but never, really, arrives. It is arms out; stretched. It is sitting with hands facing upward on knees. This was supposed to be an essay reflecting on Still/Here but words can not be formalized around so much movement. Artists imagine worlds that are livable because this one is not, though the product of this creation is also an experience of dysphoria. An experience of living in multiple worlds at once. There is a dizziness to this that I’m trying to accept as a visual artist would: color, texture, sound, sensation, humming, swarming. It’s shitty to write, actually, when I believe that disorganization is in service of something beautiful. But I do write so, months after putting that initial essay down, I broke it back apart.
The Survival Workshops & Still/Here taught me how to listen to the signal of a “wall” and let that separation be a gateway to something new, wild, or once again mundane. Time to attempt to follow the instructions we write about—to converge some of these worlds. Through my captivation with Still/Here, I learned about leaving form, allowing questions to remain questions, and letting notes stay as notes: mediums in which the landscape of the unspeakable can be embodied. I ended up at these wandering parts: the space between them is dance.
What does the stage look like where “decay and desire,” as Jones puts it, exist together?
The late critic Jose Esteban Muñoz tells us of utopia. The anthropologist Anna Tsing notices the mushrooms growing from nuclear plants. Arthur Russell might say we are all dancing to the sound of his remixed cello at the clubs, to the album he made tirelessly in his apartment in the months before he died of AIDS. We are making more sound on top of his sound.
Without language to classify our being, we are unclassified; we are movement. The Survival Workshops taught me this: this bitter truth, this bitter opening towards our fear, towards answering the unanswerable, which is also to say, an act of being defined by response—by our relations to each other.
Any art form creates life out of death.
If the binary of life and death is constituted by the state’s management of speedy, fearful, and sacrificial death, then dance adds the verbiage to death. Moving in honesty with others says yes what is happening is not death, it is dying. Dying as life-making—performance from workshop to choreography to staging—makes the mechanisms that steal life impossible to function.
In Necropolitics, Achille M’membe writes that “becoming-human-in-the-world is a question neither of birth nor of origin or race. It is a matter of journeying, of movement, and of transfiguration.” Discourse expressed in gestures and passed into performed choreography carries messages about dying as a living, breathing, full, and journey-ed process—a process that includes innovation rather than assimilation to disappearance. We see in the program of Still/Here the biography of every being involved in the dance, every participant both dead and alive. The passing becomes the physical and social site of critical production.
The gesture is an exercise in capaciousness: a space where a body moves beyond the small and finite. Bill Moyers asks Jones the same questions that Jones asks the participants in the workshops:
Now you show me, Bill, what do you want?
I want to cross over—I do not know how else to say it—I want to cross over.
Show it to me in gesture.
I’m too small now, Bill, you know, I have to be like a mountain to say it.
Jones’ arms pan outwards, gesturing a curtsy. Jones begins to stomp, both arms out and palms facing the ceiling. Arms rise, curl, and bend like tree branches growing in slow-time.
Where is a passage that is textured through artistic collaboration?
Tell me how to fight,
Tell me how to fight,
Tell me how to fight this disease because I am going to win.
—A Survival Workshop participant; words blended in Vernon Reid’s score of “Here,” the second section in Still/Here
Tell me how to fight is repeated three times, like a prayer, or an invocation, or a kneeling down.
“There is a place for denial,” one of the participants says. I understand the term place here to not be restricted to the physical. As Frantz Fanon indicates, place is an experience of being surrounded by others where your own self-awareness is a “seminal fragment” in larger humanity. Place is something that inhabits us. So a “place for denial” is a social construction of a place: a utopian place, as Muñoz shows us; a “p(l)ace” as scholar and writer Kemi Adeyemi coins; a point where place and pace converge (a house with a room to be slow, a room to speed it the fuck up, a room to be exhausted); a place that is co-created, rehearsed, and performed; a workshop; a place that trusts here enough to be here. Shit we pray for this place, but we also make this place.
“Passing on” is a reminder of a social element of moving out of life: going, offering, dying involve many subjects, times, and places. Before and after death is dying, too—sickness, grieving, ghosting, paying homage, remembering, collaborating. Jones makes stages for undoing the story of dying alone. The show keeps touring. We find it on the syllabus; we watch it from our beds.
In imagining passages that are created through artistic collaboration, there is a brave request for participation. When we pray, we move our feet; we raise arms, we march, we club, we dance, we fight, we lay with loved ones in bed, we gather, we open. I have unending gratitude for those I spoke to about the nature of this piece, and the wishes we have for our own art practices and lives—it has been an emulation of the exercise of the trust fall.
If, in prayer, one becomes an opening, how does prayer make you move?
Scholar and writer Kevin Quashi writes that “the emphasis in prayer is not so much on the deity who is listening as it is on the subject who is praying and his or her capacity and faithfulness. In this way, prayer reflects the most perfect communication—to speak to one who is and not one’s self. This excellent conversation exposes the praying self as both needy and capable.” The praying subject becomes what it prays to be. Someone asked the question. Someone listened. In the sociality of prayer, someone is also a reflection: it is both you and the circle around you. Hips on waist or legs crossed on floor or chin in palm or hands in lap.
In the echo of prayer there is also a deep loneliness. The void is what makes the sound. Imagining new ways of passage—a place where winning can occur—is a visceral recognition of loneliness, a separation from the conditions of this world. A dancer rests his body in the arms of other dancers and is then pushed back to standing; he is left in the middle of the stage, crouching with his hands on his knees while the others perform synchronous choreography in a cluster away from him. One can be surrounded by movement whilst being completely overwhelmed by stillness—this is ultimately the condition of illness.
In the performance of Still/Here, company-member Torrin Cummings personifies the words of B. Michael, an HIV positive man. Of this act, Jones writes, “I have now decided that their vitality and physical prowess are an apt and necessary metaphor for the spirit displayed by most survivors I was fortunate enough to encounter. So, Torrin’s bounding resilient undulation is B. Micheal speaking.” The gestures expand beyond a shared experience of precarious life. The response to prayer may be answered in the mere presence or echo of the space, but it is also answered in becoming the choreography.
Where is a here that holds all that you change, and all that changes you? Who is here with you?
How do I look? I ask.
You look like my future, Arnie says.
No. How do I look to you?
You look like everything I will do. Everything I want to be until the end of my life.
—Jones, Last Night on Earth, 1995
I have an altar illuminated in green across from me in front of the mirror in my room. It holds images of two family members of mine who passed on; one a musician and the other a piano player and performer. I have always memorialized them through their own sounds and movements. I believe that, as artists, performance was their invitation to keep them alive. When I turn on the music of my uncle, the haptic response of the base in my body is an entrance for his presence to come through: fast-paced, choral, drunken, elevated.
What is offered in the choreography of Still/Here is a loosening of the brutal terms of battle—falling, winning, conquering, defeating—that turn life and death into an experience of war.
Collaboration becomes a way of touching distance, being an actor in prayer, and becoming the vessel to preserve each other’s desires. In The Cancer Journals, Audre Lorde writes of her first love Endora Garret arriving in a dream the night before Lorde’s breast surgery: “Did you know how I loved you?” she writes, “You never talked of your dying, only of your work.”
I thank those who realize an expansive here-ness everyday: disabled and sick folks, elders, doulas, hospice workers, the passed spirits that sustain us, altar-makers, fearful and brave lovers, scholars in Queer of Color Critique, freedom fighters.
I watch Still/Here from my bed. Isolation is a gateway to memory; a way of being that invites time-collapsing, intimate sociality. We are constantly in contact with those who are not here through closed walls.
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