BILL'S BLOG

WHAT: Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company is looking for TWO HIGHLY SKILLED FEMALE-IDENTIFYING DANCERS WITH EXPERIENCE IN ACTING AND SINGING. Tentative start date is May 7, 2018. This is approximately a 25-week salaried position with full health benefits.

WHEN: Auditions will be held on Monday, April 2, 2018 from 12:00 PM – 5:00 PM. Please hold Tuesday, April 3, 2018 from 12:00 PM – 5:00 PM for callbacks.

Auditions are by appointment only. The deadline to submit applications will be Friday, March 30.

FOR APPOINTMENTS, PLEASE EMAIL YOUR HEADSHOT & RESUME TO: auditions@newyorklivearts.org. NO PHONE CALLS PLEASE.
WHERE:
New York Live Arts
219 W 19th Street, New York, NY, 10011
3rd Floor Studio

WHO: The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company has performed worldwide in over 200 cities in 40 countries on every major continent. The Company’s repertory is widely varied in its subject matter, visual imagery and stylistic approach to movement, voice and stagecraft and includes musically-driven works as well as works using a variety of texts. The Company has been acknowledged for its intense collaborative method of creation that has included artists as diverse as Keith Haring, Cassandra Wilson, The Orion String Quartet, the Chamber Society of Lincoln Center, Fred Hersch, Jenny Holzer, Robert Longo, Julius Hemphill and Daniel Bernard Roumain, among others.

Next month Analogy/Ambros: The Emigrant will be premiering in July at Dancers Workshop in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.  It’s the third installment to the Analogy Trilogy as it is based on a novel unlike the other two which are autobiographical oral histories. Seabald himself—in a book called The Emergence of Memory – says that Ambros is actually a biographical character. In an interview, someone asked him, “Did you have an uncle Ambros?” And he has a way of wiggling vaguely about it. So we are led to believe that Ambros is based on some fact in his life—which makes the story even more remarkable. He’s not around to ask how much.

Photo credit: Andrew Jernigan

The first installment in the trilogy, was based on my mother-in-law, Dora Amelan, from an oral history that I just happened to do with her (soon to be 16-17 years ago) for her sons (my husband and his brother). I did it for them. But when I began to read The Emigrants and started trying to first put the quasi-novelistic character together—a German man born in 1880’s with my Jewish mother-in-law Dora Amelan born in 1920— I thought why not try to make a piece where I fold them both together? And I realized it was too rich and didn’t know how to do it.

So why don’t we separate them out?… Oh!

This should be three parts!

And why don’t we take the one that is actually closest right now—which is Dora who I see twice a year and speak to every week on the phone. Let’s start with her. And that’s how the first part became about Dora.

And what’s in the middle?

My nephew. It’s the most personal thing. When I started doing his oral histories—inspired by Dora’s—we thought he was going to die. It was a time for truth telling. Was he novelistic? No, but he and I bonded around the idea of creating a work that was quasi-fictitious. I’m making a work looking at him try to make a work. He’s making a work and not knowing anything about making anything based around a character he created psychologically called “PRETTY.” My nephew… really right to the heart of trying to be who I am in the world… Very diverse group of friends making art that is not in the mainstream really. The only thing we have in common really is—yes we are both gay—that we are blood relatives and both interested in the arts. Of course he had a kink in it—one all too familiar— he was a drug addict which led him down a certain path. When I hear the term now, “at risk kids,”—literally my adult life has been asking me to come in to tell kids, “It’s ok to be an artist”, as an alternative to a life in the streets.

Well as for my nephew, I’m his uncle. He was accepted to San Francisco School of Ballet, but still ended up having a life full of sexual predation and drug abuse. So this idea that art can save us… This uncle who has bought the whole thing of being an artist as a way of salvation… and he, who on the brink of death, found that and trying to build on it… who is most in touch with reality? The uncle or the nephew? So, as I have interviewed Dora and Lance, the company, in a way, is interviewing Ambros.

***

You may have read the New York Times feature last year. I started trying to tell stories and do abstract movement at the same time that I started to make art. I was in love with the abstract possibilities of movement, but was also really intrigued by the stories that my mother and father told in the context of being in upstate New York in a German-Italian community with nice working class white people for the most part and a handful of blacks. There was this whole load of information—a lot of it before I was born—that became family lore (and I suppose every family had it)—that had to compete with American television or LIFE Magazine or the Bible. And though these stories were real—my parent’s exploits, where they came from, their childhood or their memories of the south—they might as well have been myths in themselves. So when I started, using the abstraction of my body and immediacy and minding the stories that were available to me—in the way that my mother and father would mind the stories of their childhood to entertain us, scare us, or instruct us—those worlds came together.

I didn’t want to illustrate what I was saying so I had to find other systems. Those systems  came from improvisation that I learned from Richard Bol, Lois Welk (thought leader at the American Dance Asylum, Binghamton, 1970’s), and what I might understand as system-making as Trisha Brown might understand it. Telling stories and moving was a way of answering many questions for me: Where do I fit in? – not only in the dance world, but in the contemporary art world.

(Speaking to myself) What is the confessional? You’re prone to the confessional, but how do you give shape to the confessional? And how do you position it? Is it a universal story you’re telling? Or is it hyper-personal with the potential to speak to all the hyper-personal stories your audience has? Are you a black preacher exhorting the congregation which is your audience to some hard truce about life through illustrations? Or are you a poet entertaining them with sound and fury? That’s what the story telling was in the beginning. Has it continued in that way?

The Lincoln piece, Fondly Do We Hope… Fervently Do We Pray, was an invitation to make a work for the 200^th anniversary of the birth of our president, who just happened to be “the great emancipator”… or was he? And I could do anything I wanted. I wanted to tell his story. I wanted the “story book” man to be made three-dimensional and I wanted him to be built out of the imagination of contemporary people—many of them young enough to be my children. How do we get the historical man to meet the fantasies, attention, and inattention of my organization—which is a microcosm of the world.

Arnie Zane and I use to say, “The company is not the world that we live in, it is the world we would like to live in.” Contemporary dance—or the avant garde as I understood it—was not doing characters. It was actually demonstrating something. Dance was like a 3-dimensional sculpture time-based as way of directing a group of strangers. What we did. Where we did it. It was a way to talk about things close to my heart—like politics and power—but doing it through abstraction. When small people lifted big people— Arnie Zane (5’4) lifting Bill T. Jones (6’1). And there’s something about the sweat of grappling that plays through all the fears that my parents and the southerners had about such a nation: Who is swapping spit with whom? Who is sleeping with whom? Dance has always been—or it use to be—a metaphor away from sex. But let’s just mix it up. What if anybody could dance with anybody? And what if you didn’t have to be beautiful or a god/goddess to do it? Now have that reality going on next to something Bill is saying which is maybe a memory from his mother and father or some anecdote from his life. Now that has informed [Fondly Do We Hope… Fervently Do We Pray] and also Story/Time. Big time.

Story/Time was a very self-conscious imitation of John Cage dealing with the hated narrative form. I think it’s fair to say he was against narrative—he was an Irish man so he told stories very well, but he also the thought the world was too facaded with narrative. And why did something have to start here and end there? Why couldn’t it start in the middle and then go into the beginning and then the ending? Why couldn’t everything be by chance procedure? Or why couldn’t he make stories that are all over the map and then through chance procedure organize the progression of the stories with no glue or transitions in between? It’s a very radical exercise: anti-narration. It was a challenge to me [to write and collate] 180 short stories. The concision of language—being able to understand the whole story in one minute—and now through chance procedure organize them. That is the narration running next to what? A catalogue of 30 years of creating movement. Talk about deep water here. Just have faith that you’re going to have an audience interested in the puzzle—a patient audience that you don’t have to seduce with a climax. And they will be changing the channel every minute. That is how Story/Time changed from Everybody Works/All Beasts Count—the first solo I did in 1977.

““Vivaldo,” she said, wearily, “just one thing. I don’t want you to be understanding. I don’t want you to be kind, okay?” She looked directly at him, and an unnameable heat and tension flashed violently alive between them, as close to hatred as it was to love. She softened and reached out, and touched his hand. “Promise me that.” “I promise you that,” he said. And then, furiously, “You seem to forget that I love you.” They stared at each other. Suddenly, he reached out and pulled her to him, trembling, with tears starting up behind his eyes, burning and blinding, and covered her face with kisses, which seemed to freeze as they fell. She clung to him; with a sigh she buried her face in his chest. There was nothing erotic in it; they were like two weary children. And it was she who was comforting him. Her long fingers stroked his back, and he began, slowly, with a horrible, strangling sound, to weep, for she was stroking his innocence out of him.” – James Baldwin – Another Country

This chilling scene occurs between interracial lovers, Ida (a black aspiring singer) and Vivaldo (a white writer), the morning after she has been unfaithful to him with a powerful white man explaining that this man could get her a job.

The many recent police shootings of black men stopped for minor offences could not prepare me for the shooting of Philando Castile in St Paul, MN. The exchange with the gun wielding policemen was filmed and streamed live on Facebook by his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, as her four year-old daughter sat in the back seat witnessing everything.

Several days ago, I was invited to participate with poet Claudia Rankine and WNYC’s Producer of Special Projects on Race, Rebecca Carroll, in a segment of Leonard Lopate’s show hosted by Arun Venugopal titled On Art and Civic Unrest (Listen here). Arun asked for each of our responses to the continuous barrage of such events. My answer began trying to describe this blog centered on the notion of innocence.

At any time before this latest shooting, I would have recalled the excerpt from Baldwin’s Another Country and smiled, ruefully, convinced I knew something about this experience that shocked white Americans did not.

Two more shootings of black men followed…

Then, during peaceful protests in Dallas and Baton Rouge disgruntled former soldiers, both of them black, gunned down policemen.

My rueful smile of experience slipped as I felt my own innocence ripped away from me, not stroked. What replaced it? Ineffable sadness and a curious desire to sing it away dance it away or tell you – whoever you are – about it. And yet… nothing seemed able to replace the comfortable skin, that innocence, like a discarded suit of clothes, puddled, useless at my feet.

 

And Yet…

New York Live Arts moves forward, under the leadership of Executive Director, Kim Cullen, looking to the future with significant changes to the artistic team, breaking down silos with everyone now working collaboratively towards the mission of our organization.

My long-time collaborator and Associate Artistic Director of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, Janet Wong, is now Associate Artistic Director of New York Live Arts.

Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company’s Producing Director, Kyle Maude, is now Producing Director of New York Live Arts assisted by Isabella Hreljanovic who’s been promoted to the Senior Producer position.

The second part of the Analogy Trilogy, Lance: Pretty, aka The Escape Artist had a successful opening at the American Dance Festival in Durham, NC. You can read the review here.

My nephew, Lance T. Briggs, who’s oral history is excerpted in the work and who contributed some original songs to it, flew in with his mother from Tampa, FL, and attended the performances. I had last visited him this past fall on the eve of a life threatening surgery he underwent. I was moved to have him there and to see his interaction with my dancers who were very excited at this opportunity to have an exchange with the man they had been referencing in various forms throughout the months long creative process.

 

This confluence of my personal life with my creative team and its supporters: Jodee Nimerichter and her ADF staff, former board members/funders Ellie Friedman and Carol Tolan as well as present board member Helen Mills with her husband Gary and our fearless commissioning partner, Babs Case was extremely rewarding

At one point during the NPR On Art and Civic Unrest interview, Arun Venugopal asked about a statement I had made somewhere about my desiring that Lance’s audiences should feel something akin to being in the black church: call and response, a shout-out, embraced by a community. The truest part of my answer was that I hoped this hypothetical audience might feel my heart and the truth of the conversation between me and my nephew struggling – two black men – to love, to love each other, at all times but, particularly, at this time!

 

In closing

A view from Woodbox, our little house the mesa of Northern NM where I am spending the month

Spoken word artist, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, the librettist for We Shall Not Be Moved, the opera composed by Daniel Bernard Roumain which I’ve been invited to direct and choreograph by Opera Philadelphia sent me the following on the occasion of Muhamad Ali’s passing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9xOiWnsK-Q&feature=youtu.be

April 23, 2016

WHO-Jen Rosenblit, a performance artist whose work I am just getting to know. We are co-presenting her latest work, Clap Hands with the Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn.

I saw Jen in Part 3 of Miguel Gutierrez’s Age and Beauty that we commissioned and presented here at New York Live Arts last fall. At one moment, as she and a very young performer were grappling just in front of me, Jen and I made eye contact or at least I think she was looking at me. The look was opaque, neither open or guarded, maybe wary-certainly aware. She employed that gaze much of the time in Clap Hands the other night.

(more…)

Dear Eiko,

It was a remarkable evening we shared last week. Sitting in the dinner theater audience at Michael Feinstein’s 54 Below with you and Bjorn watching Ben Vereen seemed almost dreamlike at the time and certainly more so with the steady stream of events, personalities and places we live through every day.

(more…)

 

 

 

Signifying:

The shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC didn’t really strike home, or at least strike the place that matters, until I, like most , was bowled over when our President, Barack Obama, started singing (!!!) Amazing Grace. After last year’s long hot summer (remember Ferguson, remember Michael Brown, remember Eric Garner…) I was – as I am sure others were – beginning to feel that I was suffering from a kind of fatigue. Call it race, call it violence in America, call it the intractable conversation, call it the 24 hours news cycle… But now, this public and heartfelt expression of an age-old African American ritual, in which our President was literally leading, was wrenching and even clarifying. So this is where we are at now. We at New York Live Arts are moved and we are looking for the correct actions and partners to help make this tragic event, so burdened with symbolism or should I say signification, a meaningful and potent action. Our next season’s Open Spectrum series is a logical place for this work to begin…

Signifyin’

New York Live Arts is cooking! Kim Cullen (Interim ED), Tommy Kriegsman (Director of Programs), Andrea Nellis (General Manager), Jean Davidson (Outgoing ED), Bjorn Amelan (Creative Director) and myself (Artistic Director) continue to negotiate this transitional moment under the tireless leadership of our Board Chair, Richard Levy, and the Board itself.

Downstairs in the Theater, an impressive lineup of rentals has been keeping things lively and the company’s dancers, fresh from their successful premiere of Analogy:Dora/Tramontane at Montclair State University, have embarked on a weeklong workshop intensive with students from across the nation.

Jenna Riegel and Talli Jackson, two BTJ/AZ dancers, invited me to drop in on that workshop and share some insights and ideas about Story/Time, the subject of that week. As I walked into the studios, a group of young students were drilling a short sequence from Blauvelt Mountain (one of the menu items used in the choreography of Story/Time), an important duet that Arnie Zane and I created in 1980. Unlike Arnie and my own pairing, these young students’ pairings were mixed in ways (gender, body type, race…) that I could not have accepted some 10+ years ago when we began restaging the dance. I was overwhelmingly attached at that time to the “short/tall, Black/White, male/male” template that I felt was essential to the very meaning of the piece. It’s curious how these signifiers of flesh and bone reality, Arnie’s and my relationship, have receded with time. What is left is the ritual of gesture, spacial negotiation, sound and the all-important task-based choreography.

Leaving the workshop and killing time before I attempted this blog, I picked up the April 2015 edition of the very handsome Congress on Research in Dance – Dance Research Journal published by Cambridge University Press. All the articles are well researched, striving to articulate timely issues in the field of performance, scholarship and history.

Two articles caught my attention:

The first is Erin Brannigan’s Dance in the Gallery: Curation as Revision. Editor Mark Franko describes the article as “questioning the extension of the choreographic into the gallery setting, and interrogating the consequences of the over expanded concept of ‘the choreographic’ that has served to veil the influence of dance on visual arts since the early 20th Century. Brannigan points to the challenges of revising the history of a relation that is now being made visible, but is also distorted in the gallery context. The relocation of dance to the visual art site of display in the museum implies a deskilling of the choreographer whose function is now appropriated by the curator.  The drive to extinguish medium-specificity is considered as another strategy of expropriation of dance as a discipline. The anxiety of influence hangs like a dark cloud over this scene of transference.”

I suppose this anxiety is of the same variety I feel with the brand new Whitney’s new theater, its Curator of Performance, the New Museum’s Performance Series and the ongoing curation at venerable institutions as the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Arts. I was a bit chilled by a quote from one part of this essay entitled Body as Archive in which the writer (Brannigan) says “The power play between the robust gallery and the transient dance is clearly articulated in Jerome Bell’s opening quote in which he suggests that the gallery as an institution bestows worth on dance as an art form: ‘Dance is starting to be recognized as art. In the end it is as if you had to enter the museum to be legitimized!’”

Silly me, I thought dance was an art already… or, at least, that was the way I have been behaving for the past 44 years…

The second article that caught my attention is Tiffany Barber’s Ghostcatching and After Ghostcatching, Dances in the Dark. (See excerpts at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL5w_b-F8ig and https://vimeo.com/12957216). Editor Franko describes it as concerning “the relation between two versions of a work of digital dance and the underlying transfer of Bill T. Jones’s improvisation with its virtual rendering through motion capture. Ultimately, the article discusses how digital culture as a ‘utopian space,’ can erase all traces of race, gender, and sexuality from the dancing body, coincides with a post-racial discourse where race is no longer visually marked. This is complicated by Jones’s turn to a formalist approach to choreography in the wake of the Still/Here affair. Barbara skillfully teases out the contradictory desires (of Jones as well as his critics) to detach Jones’s material body – marked as it is by race, sexuality and gender – from the virtual body depicted in Ghostcatching and to insist on the impossibility of that detachment.”

You can imagine the “frisson” I experienced when reading this article on the same day as the obituary in The New York Times of NY City Ballet’s – do I dare call him “Black” – dancer, Albert Evans, wherein he is quoted saying “People should know you from the stage, and not from your life. If someone can find out who you are from the stage, that’s everything.”

Ms Barber’s article, like the Dance Research Journal itself, is evidence of keen intelligence in search of truth(s). Whenever I read such analysis dependent on a strict, esoteric use of “art-speak” and proceeding from a passionately researched platform of historic detective work, I ask: What is it for? And after, what does it mean? What does it signify

Nonetheless, I am honored to be part of a serious discourse, wherever and however it occurs!

Two sentences in the article gave me the theme for this blog’s entry:

1. “In Ghostcatching, Jones’s dancing body – which arguably had become a sign for black, gay male sexuality by the time artist Robert Mapplethorpe photographed him in 1985…”

 

1. “Critical accounts by dance study scholar’s Ann Dils and Danielle Goldman exemplify the difficulty in making sense of Jones as a signified body among the digital dancing bodies that populate Ghostcatching… For Goldman sweat, breath, and flesh ‘matter’ and she leans on Jones’s physical (signifying body) in order to make sense of the work.”

On the verge of hyperventilating, I tried to disentangle the various threads of my discomfort at being assigned a role in which I had very little say. I began gathering a list of colleagues and wondering what their bodies have come to signify. Merce Cunningham – also mentioned in this article as de-sexing his dancers’ digital avatars – was he ever a white, gay male dancing body? What about Stephen Petronio – my generation – certainly gay and a flamboyant performer to boot? What of Mikhail Baryshnikov? Is he a signifier of white, male heterosexuality? What about Ralph Lemon, Trajal Harrell? What about recently departed Dudley Williams? What about John Jasperse? The list certainly goes on, but what about Trisha Brown, Sarah Michelson, RoseAnne Spradlin? This maddening head game goes on and on like a vortex spinning to heaven or hell…

The following quote, while certainly not intended as any pejorative jars me and certainly flies in the face of historical record:

“Jones’s use of motion capture technology as a response to the confines of race and racialized looking practices cannot be dismissed, given all the preconceptions surrounding his choreographic output in the 1990’s and his attraction to the medium.”

This authorship assigned to me is curious and enervating. I rang up Paul Kaiser of the Open Ended Group who, along with Shelley Eshkar, conceived the technological scheme behind this trailblazing work. Paul, who informed me that while he always meets requests from academics about these works with generosity seldom reads what they write, had several comments about the article.

1. He feels that authors of academic articles seldom speak to their living subjects, but rely on the record of what is printed and said, often by their colleagues.

 

1. They approach a work, which is in fact, a collaboration in the spirit of the “great man theory”, that is, I (Bill T. Jones) am the most public figure – the most famous if you will – therefore the work has to be of me and by me. It is much more difficult with the passage of time to pinpoint the various points of agency in a collaboration like Ghostcatching.

 

1. They attach themselves to the artifact – perhaps necessarily – at the expense of loosing the wide array of impulses, notions and avenues of exploration and questioning that are embedded in the collaboration.

 

1. Paul feels that by placing such an emphasis on my Black, gay body, they shut off any ability to recognize the myriad metaphorical forces at work in the piece.

 

I personally take issue with the assumption that the Arlene Croce Still/Here affair made me rush to digital technology’s “utopian” space that promised race-free, sex-free entre in the upper precincts of the race-free, sex-free serious art world. Such a notion ignores all of the highly formal, constructivist works done with Arnie Zane, as well as works like D-Man in the Waters, a work of music driven formalism not to mention contemporaneous works such as Love Defined (to music of Daniel Johnston), Absence (to Berlioz’s song cycle La Nuit d’Ete), and on and on…

In my conversation with Paul Kaiser, I mentioned the use of the term “signify”. Paul was mildly perplexed saying, “Oh, that term. They do that… it’s because of that Swiss linguist… What’s his name? From way back…?”

Where to turn? To the Internet, of course! I learned a great deal from Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler. He introduces two thinkers: linguist Ferdinand de Sassure and philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce. Chandler takes the reader on a fascinating journey in the curious world of semiotics.

On “signify”:

Saussure offered a ‘dyadic’ or two-part model of the sign. He defined a sign as being composed of:

• – a ‘signifier’ (signifiant) – the form which the sign takes; and

 

• – the ‘signified’ (signifié) – the concept it represents.

 

The sign is the whole that results from the association of the signifier with the signified (Saussure 1983, 67; Saussure 1974, 67). The relationship between the signifier and the signified is referred to as ‘signification’, and this is represented in the Saussurean diagram by the arrows. The horizontal line marking the two elements of the sign is referred to as ‘the bar’.

If we take a linguistic example, the word ‘Open’ (when it is invested with meaning by someone who encounters it on a shop doorway) is a sign consisting of:

• a signifier: the word open;

 

• a signified concept: that the shop is open for business.

 

At around the same time as Saussure was formulating his model of the sign, of ‘semiology’ and of a structuralist methodology, across the Atlantic independent work was also in progress as the pragmatist philosopher and logician Charles Sanders Peirce formulated his own model of the sign, of ‘semiotic’ and of the taxonomies of signs. In contrast to Saussure’s model of the sign in the form of a ‘self-contained dyad’, Peirce offered a triadic model:

• The Representamen: the form which the sign takes (not necessarily material);

 

• An Interpretant: not an interpreter but rather the sense made of the sign;

 

• An Object: to which the sign refers.

 

‘A sign… [in the form of a representamen] is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object. It stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea, which I have sometimes called the ground of the representamen’ (Peirce 1931-58, 2.228). The interaction between the representamen, the object and the interpretant is referred to by Peirce as ‘semiosis’(ibid., 5.484). Within Peirce’s model of the sign, the traffic light sign for ‘stop’ would consist of: a red light facing traffic at an intersection (the representamen); vehicles halting (the object) and the idea that a red light indicates that vehicles must stop (the interpretant).

After this serious immersion in “signify” as both semiotics and arts-speak, I could not shake the feeling that the word has another, perhaps more profound, association for me personally. I recall as a child, hearing two men – or it could have been a man and a woman – arguing.

-“After you done finished all that signifyin’ I’m gonna kick yo ass!”

This fragment of memory opens a door into a room I had not entered in years. This room could be the entre into what Skip Gates calls a strategy of the African-American literary tradition in his 1988 The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism.

“The Signifying Monkey is a character of African-American folklore that derives from the trickster figure of Yoruba mythology, Esu Elegbara. This character was transported with Africans to the Americas under the names of Exu, Echu-Elegua, Papa Legba, and Papa Le Bas. Esu and his variants all serve as messengers who mediated between the gods and men by means of tricks.[1] The Signifying Monkey is “distinctly Afro-American” but is thought to derive from Yoruban mythology, which depicts Echu-Elegua with a monkey at his side.[2]

Numerous songs and narratives concern the Signifying Monkey and his interactions with his friends, the Lion and the Elephant.[3] In general the stories depict the Signifying Monkey insulting the Lion, but claiming that he is only repeating the Elephant’s words. The Lion then confronts the Elephant, who soundly beats the Lion. The Lion later comes to realize that the Monkey has been signifyin(g) and has duped him and returns angrily.[4]”

I thought I would leave you with two items and let you decide what they “signify” in the context of this blog:

1. The Signifying Monkey*

 

Deep down in the jungle so they say
There’s a signifying motherfucker down the way.
There hadn’t been no disturbin’ in the jungle for quite a bit,
For up jumped the monkey in the tree one day and laughed,
“I guess I’ll start some shit.” (5)
Now the lion come through the jungle one peaceful day,
When the signifying monkey stopped him and this what he started to say.
He said, “Mr. Lion,” he said, “A bad-assed motherfucker down your way.
He said, “Yeah! The way he talks about your folks is a certain shame.
I even heard him curse when he mentioned your grandmother’s name.” (10)
The lion’s tail shot back like a forty-four,
When he went down the jungle in all uproar.
He was pushing over mountains, knocking down trees.
In the middle of a pass he met an ape.
He said, “I ought to beat your ass just to get in shape.” (15)
He met the elephant in the shade of a tree.
“Come on long-eared motherfucker, it’s gonna be you and me.”
Now the elephant looked up out the corner of his eye,
Said, “Go on bird-shit, fight somebody your size.”
Then the lion jumped back and made a hell of a pass. (20)
The elephant side-stepped and kicked him dead on his ass.
Now he knocked in his teeth, fucked-up his eye,
Kicked in his ribs, tied-up his face,
Tied his tail in knots, stretched his tail out of place.
Now they fought all that night, half the next day. (25)
I’ll be damned if I can see how the lion got away.
When they was fussing and fighting, lion came back through the jungle more dead than alive,
When the monkey started some more of that signifying jive.
He said, “Damn, Mr. Lion, you went through here yesterday, the jungle rung.
Now you comeback today, damn near hung.” (30)
He said, “Now you come by here when me and my wife trying to get a little bit,
T’ tell me that ‘I rule’ shit.”
He said, “Shut up, motherfucker, you better not roar
‘Cause I’ll come down there and kick your ass some more.”
The monkey started getting panicked and jumped up and down, (35)
When his feet slipped and his ass hit the ground.
Like a bolt of lightning, a stripe of white heat,
The lion was on the monkey with all four feet.
The monkey looked up with a tear in his eyes,
He said, “Please, Mr. Lion, I apologize.” (40)
He said, “You lemme get my head out the sand
Ass out the grass, I’ll fight you like a natural man.”
The lion jumped back and squared for a fight.
The motherfucking monkey jumped clear out of sight.
He said, “Yeah, you had me down, you had me last, (45)
But you left me free, now you can still kiss my ass.”
Again he started getting panicked and jumping up and down.
His feet slipped and his ass hit the ground.
Like a bolt of lightning, stripe of white heat,
Once more the lion was on the monkey with all four feet. (50)
Monkey looked up again with tears in his eyes.
He said, “Please, Mr. Lion, I apologize.”
Lion said, “Ain’t gonna be no apologizing.
I’ma put an end to his motherfucking signifying.”
Now when you go through the jungle, there’s a tombstone so they say, (55)
“Here the Signifying Monkey lay,
Who got kicked in the nose, fucked-up in the eyes,
Stomped in the ribs, kicked in the face,
Drove backwards to his ass-hole, knocked his neck out of place.”
That’s what I say. (60)
“Kid” (1964)

“The Signifying Monkey” is a classic routine originally on a comedy album by Rudy Ray Moore”.

*Taken from Roger D. Abrahams, Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia (Hatboro, PA: Folklore Associates, 1964): 149-51. This variant of “The Signifying Monkey” is a toast, a narrative poem improvised in performance from a store of themes, conventions, and formulas.

2. And lastly this link to a clip from the Blacksploitation flix Dolomite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Voxp3ckwJZ0&app=desktop

On Dora’s last breakfast with us we pulled this link up. At one point looking pained and confused she said to us, “That’s a lot of ‘fucking’” before tuning out and turning her attention elsewhere!

Our new brochure of next year’s exciting season is just being released. Take a look at it is a stimulating line-up!

Do You Like Film:

I recommend Netflix’s WHAT HAPPENED, MISS SIMONE. A moving, sometimes troubling portrait of a great artist!

 

 

 

Hello! And a Happy Spring (at last!).

This blog/this essay/this stream of consciousness… Whatever you’d like to call it is going to be – depending on your point of view – in two parts or in thirty. It is an attempt to embrace fragmentation. What I mean by that is an acknowledgement of the diverse and often conflicting impulses, thoughts and responses I feel personally around life in general, New York Live Arts in particular and…
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At the invitation of Gotham Opera’s Artistic Director and Conductor, Neal Goren, Bjorn and I attended that company’s gala performance of a new work, The Tempest Songbook, at the Metropolitan Museum’s Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium.

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