Analogy Trilogy

“Memory, often strikes me as a kind of dumbness. It makes one’s head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down on the earth from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds.” —W.G. Sebald

CAP UCLA presents Analogy Trilogy, a new and ambitious three-part work from the acclaimedBill T. Jones /Arnie Zane Company. All three works — Analogy/Dora: Tramontane, Analogy/Lance: Pretty aka The Escape Artist and Analogy/Ambros: The Emigrant — will be presented in one seven-hour marathon performance that includes all three works, dinner and a post-show Q & A with the company. Analogy Trilogy searches for the connection between the three varying stories; focusing on memoryand the effect of powerful events on the actionsof individuals and, more importantly, on their often unexpressed inner life. As with his previous workA Rite, Jones continues his exploration of how text, storytelling and movement pull and push against each other and how another experience can behad through the combination and recombination of these elements, furthering the development of his company into an ensemble that not only dances beautifully, but also sings and speaks.

Analogy/Dora: Tramontane (2pm)

Analogy/Dora: Tramontane is based on an oral history Jones conducted with then 95-year-old Dora Amelan, a French Jewish nurse and social worker. Amelan’s harrowing, touching and inspirational story is broken into approximately 25 episodes that become the basis for choreography and songs. These episodes chronicle her early life in Belgium, her mother’s death as the Germans were marching into Belgium and her experiences working at an underground Jewish organization in Vichy France’s internment camps, Gurs and Rive-saltes. Here is a portrait of the ability to persevere and survive.

Analogy/Lance: Pretty aka The Escape Artist (4pm)

In Analogy/Lance: Pretty aka The Escape Artist, we meet Lance whose battles with his own personal demons of drugs and excess exposeus to another type of war. It was the battlefield of the nightlife and underworld of the late `80s and early `90s club culture and sex trade. This “pretty boy-gangster thug,” a name he acquired in prison, holds steadfast to his often tragic and sometimes outrageously humorous narrative, while facing an uncertain future.

Analogy/Ambros: The Emigrant (7pm)

Analogy/Ambros: The Emigrant is Jones’ reaction to the character Ambros Adelwarth from W.G. Sebald’s celebrated historical novel,The Emigrants. This narrative, through a fictionalized history, strives to suggest how an experience of trauma can go under- ground in the psyche of an individual and direct consciously and unconsciously the course of that individual’s life. The central figure, Ambros Adelwarth, is a German valet/manservant who serves as companion to a privileged, dissipated, young scion of a wealthy Jewish family. This restrained and evocative narrative tracks Ambros’ experience working at hotels, the glamorous travels with his charge, Cosmo, through Europe and the Middle East on the eve of WWI and then his life after Cosmo’s death.