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- Title
Incessant Daily Negotiations: Bill T. Jones's Floating the Tongue.
- Authors
Browning, Barbara
- Abstract
This article presents information on the works and achievements of dance choreographer Bill T. Jones. Jones has inscribed, through dance, some of the most indelible traces of a belief in the creative, politicized gesture toward caring and nonviolence. He also came to this choreography through attentiveness to subtle negotiations. Floating the Tongue, Jones's small, perfect, scripted, and yet improvised dance, may invoke his mother's prayers, but it grew out of a different of spiritual practice--a yogic exercise of stillness. From a meditative posture in which the tongue floats freely in his still body, Jones proceeds to dance a movement sequence--first in silence, then articulating purely and mechanically the very movements his limbs trace in the air. In the third iteration of the dance, he allows himself to 'read' its choreographic text by improvisationally allowing the movement phrases to evoke myriad associations and memories. Each association is indelibly written in the seemingly fleeting motion of the dance. The meanings of that embodied text are inevitably personal and political, difficult, and engaged with the world. And in the final phase, he loosens text, tongue, muscle, and bone, and allows both language and movement to exceed their own bounds. His words swell and explode into groans and shouts, his movement bursting out of the set phrase into spasms, shivers, and convulsions.
- Subjects
JONES, Bill T., 1954-; CHOREOGRAPHERS; DANCERS; ARTISTS; BODY language
- Publication
TDR: The Drama Review (MIT Press), 2005, Vol 49, Issue 2, p87
- ISSN
1054-2043
- Publication type
Entertainment Review
- DOI
10.1162/1054204053971081