Jones's "Blind Date" Falls Flat

By Weston R. Sager | Friday, January 20, 2006

Bill T. Jones /Arnie Dance Company’s production of Blind Date would ostensibly fall into the category “abstract post-modern art.” However, the speech and dance production that the openly gay black fifty-three-year-old HIV-positive choreographer Bill T. Jones gave on campus last week failed miserably, trying so hard to be artistic that it failed to be anything at all.

Jones spoke at Dartmouth Hall the night before his two performances of Blind Date . In a speech entitled “Does Might Make Right?” the self-described “lefty” discussed his inspiration for Blind Date and ranted about the problems of America in an hour-long speech. Basing the show on “18 th century Enlightenment philosophy,” Jones sought to redefine “progress, deism, and tolerance” in Blind Date . Although he admits that he is no politician, Jones professes that his beliefs are important to help America get past its “toxic certainty.” In addition to discussing his inspiration for Blind Date , Jones touched on the major controversial topics of the modern era, from capitalism to military action to homosexuality. Since he apparently thought it hadn’t been done before, Jones decided to take aim at traditional views of American culture and incorporate his own radical views into Blind Date .

Towards the end of his speech, Jones described the logistical problems of Blind Date , and how difficult it was to raise funds for his production. After seeing Blind Date , this comes as little surprise. The script (a generous characterization, if any) is largely a concoction of anti-establishment one-liners. There was no plot per se ; Jones fills the first act and much of the second with a mish-mash of seemingly random scenes based loosely around a young man who is recruited by the military. The dialogue, if written down, would consist of only a few pages,so Jones mercilessly repeats the same lines over and over again to fill two hours.

And just in case his audience is somehow unable to hear the definitions of “progress, deism, and tolerance” repeated ad nauseum , Jones overwhelms them with text projected onto onstage screens. Given the sheer volume of information being projected onstage at any given point in time, the play came off more as indoctrination than theater. Thankfully, I managed to resist the urge to hurl a hammer through the Big Brother-esque screen.

To be fair, Bill T. Jones is not a script-writer nor set-designer, but rather a choreographer, so the show’s forte should theoretically be its dancing. That assumption, however, turned out to be flat-out wrong. The “dancing” was a bizarre menagerie of convulsions and rigid marching. Jones seemingly ran out of dance moves about halfway into blocking the show, and much like the dialogue, repeated the same moves tirelessly throughout the performance.

Admittedly, it can be difficult to judge a dancer’s talent when he appears to be imitating a seizure-victim in an oil slick to show “emotions,” but even the few times of coordinated dancing were not quite in sync. For example, early on in the show, the dancers yell out “Me!” and faint. The other dancers rush over to support the person and gently support him or her as they fall to the ground. However, in one instance the dancers missed their cues, and the fainting dancer ended up falling face-first onto the stage.

Towards the end of the first act, Jones creates a mockery of the fast food industry by introducing a fake chain, entitled Quack-A-Dack Burgers. First he blindsides the audience with an abrasive video-commercial of explosions and obnoxious quacking noise, then a young man dressed up in an oversized chicken head appears and prances about onstage. However, Jones fails at even the simple task of satirizing the fast-food industry. The fast food image, so over-done in recent media to encapsulate American over-abundance, could have been an opportunity to create a somewhat funny multi-layered critique of capitalism. However, Jones takes the trite road and opts for the shallow.

The first act was irritating at best, but nothing could have prepared me for the downright revolting second act. Offensive cannot fully describe just how abhorrently this performance finished. In particular, the scene where a young girl quotes Leviticus as half-naked dancers pose in sexual, and often homosexual, poses, served as purely an exercise in shock value, and added little. Another scene wherein a dancer shouted all the casualty figures of all the natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and armed conflicts of the past seven or so years was another feat in poor taste. The conclusion of the show, which was ended in a flurry of intentional off-key singing and contorted dancing left me shocked, but provided little else other than a yet another stale attack on American culture.

Overall, Blind Date can be summed up as “a tale … full of sound and fury; signifying nothing.” Jones overextends his message, covering too many themes. As such, he says a lot but doesn’t say anything new. Jones simply reiterates much of what the far-left has said for the past few years, except with a backdrop of spastic dance motions and harsh musical dissonance. The political messages of Blind Date are so explicit that Jones leaves nothing to the theater-goer to take away other than the most basic of messages. Perhaps if Jones had done a better job of balancing the over-the-top dancing, music, and politics, and focusing on specific issues instead of running the entire gamut of social concerns, he might have created a controversial, but at the very least, thought provoking piece of art.

What is most perplexing about the show is the fact that this is somehow tied to the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. The Daily Dartmouth stated that Jones’ Blind Date “reflects King’s dreams in its examination of social concerns” and was made an integral part of Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebrations. Unless Martin Luther King Jr. was a supporter of public sex acts and suffocating anti-American sentiment, there is no connection to him and this show. Hopefully, Bill T. Jones’ fourth trip to Dartmouth will be his last.

Jones's "Blind Date" Falls Flat

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