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Counterfactual Moving in Bill T. Jones's Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 May 2015

Ariel Nereson
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Extract

History has rules. One rule dictates that a people whose identity has been forged by violence and deprivation will manifest violence and deprivation. Such rules must be broken.

—Bill T. Jones
When Bill T. Jones's longtime creative and life partner Arnie Zane was in the last months of his life, the pair began conceiving a new work for their dance company, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company (BTJ/AZ), that was inspired by Zane's love of Leonardo da Vinci's painting The Last Supper and a gift from company member Seán Curran of a pornographic deck of playing cards titled 52 Handsome Nudes. Zane generated the image of African American opera star Jessye Norman “on an ice floe, suspended above the stage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music” as a postmodern interpretation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's character Eliza Harris, the romantic heroine of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Zane passed away in March of 1988, and Jones continued on with their idea, eventually staging and touring Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land in 1990. The first half of the work, comprising “The Cabin” and “Eliza on the Ice,” is a reimagining of Stowe's classic text that is part of one of the company's abiding projects, the choreographing of contemporary relationships to history. For Jones and many in his company, Uncle Tom's Cabin was not simply a story from the past but was rather a persistent narrative that has shaped historical trajectories of racial prejudice within the United States and in current lived experiences of racialized embodiment. This essay examines how the company's multiracial cast performed “Eliza on the Ice” as an experiment in historical inquiry through imagining “counterfactuals” to Stowe's representation of the racially hybrid Eliza. I propose that the company's choreographic and conceptual strategy of counterfactual moving, through its emphasis on embodiment, critically addresses the impact of the historical past on present bodies.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 56 , Issue 2 , May 2015 , pp. 166 - 186
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 2015 

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References

Endnotes

1. Jones, Bill T. with Gillespie, Peggy, Last Night on Earth (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997), 197Google Scholar.

2. Ibid., 204. Jones's autobiography contains a long chapter on the creation of Last Supper, including the story of its origins in what Jones calls the “fragmented chronology” that is his history as a black man (205).

3. Ibid., 204.

4. The inspiration from the deck of playing cards remained conceptually evident in the work's finale, which included fifty-two nude performers from each city in which the work was performed. In the title, The Promised Land replaces the original title, Featuring 52 Handsome Nudes, which was changed to appease skittish sponsors. The work premiered as part of the New Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) on 8 November 1990 and went on to tour for almost two years to thirty cities internationally. See Jones, 223, for discussion of the work's touring.

5. Jones, 197.

6. For more sustained discussion on the tragic mulatta type, see Joseph, Ralina L., Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennial Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013)Google Scholar; Manganelli, Kimberly Snyder, Transatlantic Spectacles of Race: The Tragic Mulatta and the Tragic Muse (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012)Google Scholar; and Raimon, Eve Allegra, The “Tragic Mulatta” Revisited: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Antislavery Fiction (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

7. Although in this essay I am concerned primarily with counterfactual thinking as it relates to the discipline of history, we all engage in counterfactual thinking as part of our reasoning processes. See Epstude, Kai and Roese, Neal J., “The Functional Theory of Counterfactual Thinking,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 12.2 (2008): 168–92CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

8. Gaddis, John Lewis, The Landscape of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 100Google Scholar.

9. Ibid., 101.

10. Herein lies counterfactual thinking's challenge to historical inquiry. As Martin Bunzl puts it, “The rhetoric of historical methodology makes evidence central in a foundational conception of the discipline, and (direct) evidence is just what you can't have for claims that are by definition contrary to fact.” Bunzl, “Counterfactual History: A User's Guide,” American Historical Review 109.3 (2004): 845–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 845.

11. See Gallagher, Catherine, “Telling It Like It Wasn't,” Pacific Coast Philology 45 (2010): 12–25Google Scholar, for discussion of trends over time in counterfactual historical narratives. Gallagher identifies an “impulse toward historical justice” in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s as guiding the increase in counterfactualism (18). This impulse, in combination with the humanities-wide influence of postmodernism, distinguishes counterfactual history of the past fifty or so years from previous counterfactual histories (often in the field of military history) whose use-value lay in thought exercise rather than in producing actions leading to a more just or equitable state. While counterfactual and public history are distinct fields, both are open by definition to points of view other than those that dominate the historical record and consider these alternatives legitimate elements of historical practice. In their counterfactual representations of the Eliza figure, BTJ/AZ draw upon the experiences of history's “users” (as David Thelen would put it; see n. 12) in the present, these users being the dancers, thus combining counterfactual and public historical approaches.

12. Thelen, David, “But Is It History?” Public Historian 22.1 (2000): 39–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 44.

13. Lebow, Richard Ned, “Counterfactual Thought Experiments: A Necessary Teaching Tool,” History Teacher 40.2 (2007): 153–76Google Scholar, at 162.

14. Gallagher, 12.

15. Ibid. Gallagher also describes the moment of the 1990s as particularly ripe for counterfactual thinking in both history as a discipline and in historical fiction (ibid., 22). Last Supper participates in this interdisciplinary interest while revising the utility of counterfactual thinking through the medium of dance.

16. Bunzl, 846.

17. For a detailed description, see Hagedorn, Ann, Beyond the River: The Untold Story of the Heroes of the Underground Railroad (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 136–43Google Scholar.

18. Not unlike Stowe's later character of Simon Legree, Shaw is well known for his cruelty.

19. Hagedorn, 137. Stowe echoes this sentiment when Eliza is helped over the banks of the Ohio side of the river by Mr. Symmes, who promises not to turn her over to the slave hunters: “You've arnt your liberty, and you shall have it, for all me.” Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), 82Google Scholar. All subsequent quotations from Uncle Tom's Cabin are from this edition of Stowe's text. Although this essay deals primarily with textual representations of Eliza in Stowe's original novel, the character also has a long stage and screen history of performed representations. See Frick, John W., “Uncle Tom's Cabin” on the American Stage and Screen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)Google Scholar.

20. Bordewich, Fergus M., Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 371Google Scholar.

21. Murphy, Jacqueline Shea, “Unrest and Uncle Tom: Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company's Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land,” in Bodies of the Text: Dance as Theory, Literature as Dance, ed. Goellner, Ellen W. and Murphy, Jacqueline Shea (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 81–105Google Scholar, at 93.

22. See Murphy for a detailed discussion of representations of dancing in Stowe's novel. For movement analysis of “The Cabin” and “The Promised Land” sections of the work, see Albright, Ann Cooper, Choreographing Difference: The Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; and Martin, Randy, Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

23. Bill T. Jones: Dancing to the Promised Land, dir. Scorer, Mischa (New York: VIEW Video, 2004)Google Scholar.

24. The interrelationship of Christianity, blackness, and understanding histories haunts Jones throughout this work as he juxtaposes history, religion, and art as meaning-making practices. Although space precludes a sustained engagement with Jones's representations of black Christianity, this is a particularly rich topic for analysis. For the relationship between Stowe's characterization of Eliza and the novel's sentimental Christianity, see Ammons, Elizabeth, “Heroines in Uncle Tom's Cabin,” American Literature 49.2 (1977): 161–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 164–6.

25. For example, the 1910 Louisiana state court decision in State v. Treadway concluded that “the person too black to be a mulatto and too pale in color to be a negro is a griff. The person too dark to be a white, and too bright to be a griff, is a mulatto. The quadroon is distinctly whiter than the mulatto. Between these different shades, we do not believe there is much, if any, difficulty in distinguishing.” Quoted in Hochschild, Jennifer and Weaver, Vesla, “Policies of Racial Classification and the Politics of Racial Inequality,” in Remaking America: Democracy and Public Policy in an Age of Inequality, ed. Soss, Joe, Hacker, Jacob S., and Mettler, Suzanne (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007), 159–82Google Scholar, at 162. Hochschild and Weaver offer a detailed account of racial categorization in the U.S. census and in U.S. legal policies.

26. Yarborough, Richard, “Strategies of Black Characterization in Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Early Afro-American Novel,” in New Essays on “Uncle Tom's Cabin,” ed. Sundquist, Eric J. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 45–84Google Scholar, at 51.

27. Stowe, 18. A further example of Stowe's connection between white skin and white morality can be found in her description of Eliza's wedding day: “And her mistress herself adorned the bride's beautiful hair with orange-blossoms, and threw over it the bridal veil, which certainly could scarce have rested on a fairer head; and there was no lack of white gloves”; ibid., 21.

28. There are several worthwhile studies of race, femininity, and hybridity in Uncle Tom's Cabin, including Goldner, Ellen J., “Arguing with Pictures: Race, Class and the Formation of Popular Abolitionism through Uncle Tom's Cabin,” Journal of American & Comparative Cultures 24, nos. 1–2 (2001): 71–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hiraldo, Carlos, Segregated Miscegenation: On the Treatment of Racial Hybridity in the U.S. and Latin American Literary Traditions (New York: Routledge, 2003)Google Scholar; and Morgan, Jo-Ann, “Uncle Tom's Cabin” as Visual Culture (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

29. Fleetwood, Nicole R., Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011)Google Scholar, 72. Fleetwood further claims that “colorism cannot be divorced from the institution of slavery” (75).

30. Baldwin, James, Notes of a Native Son (New York: Dial Press, 1963), 16Google Scholar.

31. Brody, Jennifer DeVere, Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 66Google Scholar.

32. Stowe, 18.

33. Ibid., 91.

34. For more on the spectacular qualities of Tom shows, see Frick.

35. Young, Harvey, Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 11CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36. Johnson, Mark, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 22Google Scholar.

37. “Knowing your world thus requires exquisitely fine adjustments of muscular tension and exertion, calibrated via the tensive qualities that you feel in your body.” Ibid.

38. Ibid.

39. Ibid.

40. Ibid., 24.

41. Ibid. For the original essay, see Iris Young, Marion, “Throwing like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality,” Human Studies 3.2 (1980): 137–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; repr. in On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 27–45Google Scholar.

42. Fleetwood, 72.

43. Ibid., 87.

44. The racial diversity of the Elizas also speaks to the possibility of what Susan Manning has termed “cross-viewing,” wherein “spectators may catch glimpses of subjectivities from social locations that differ from their own. . . . Cross-viewing has the potential to alter how publics read bodies in motion and thus to effect social and artistic change.” Manning, Modern Dance, Negro Dance: Race in Motion (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2004), xviGoogle Scholar. By creating a broad spectrum of possible empathic connections between performers and spectators, Jones invites the kind of cross-viewing practices that Manning describes, often in spite of more narrowly conceived racialized performance in the mid-twentieth-century concert dance scene.

45. Jones, 212.

46. Ibid. See Bill T. Jones: Dancing to the Promised Land for Jones's description of a particular gesture of a woman folding her hands over the top of a hoe and putting her weight on one hip as derived specifically from his mother and grandmother.

47. Andrea Woods Valdés, interview with the author, 29 January 2013.

48. For the full text of Truth's speech, see Sojourner Truth, “Ain't I a Woman?” in Internet Modern History Sourcebook, ed. Paul Halsall, accessed 28 October 2013, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/sojtruth-woman.asp.

49. Gaddis, 125.

50. I want to acknowledge that my assumptions about the “reading” ability of spectators are firmly rooted in a contemporary U.S. place and time and that I assume most spectators were aware of the history of violence and racism performed on nonwhite bodies in the United States that is heavily referenced in the work. It is also worth noting that when the piece travels, these assumptions change to greater and lesser degrees. For example, Sage Cowles shared an anecdote about touring to Lyon, France, where “at [the presenters'] opening night, everyone was dressed as old Southern mammies. I don't think they had a clue what to do with this [the work], really. Everybody had turbans on their heads, the menu had grits. It was like going back to the plantation, kind of. They were all very hopeful that this was a fine thing to do, and we were just aghast.” Sage Cowles, interview with the author, 12 March 2013.

51. Truth.

52. Woods Valdés, interview with the author, 29 January 2013.

53. Heidi Latsky, interview with the author, 31 January 2013.

54. Stowe, 86, 90.

55. Jones describes the dogs as “ludicrous”; Jones, 213. In a practical sense, their function is to provide choreography for the male members of the company while the women dance the Elizas. The dogs dance at the edge of playfulness and seriousness: Arthur Aviles described the dogs' dancing as “macho play” but contended that there remained “a seriousness to that. That [choreography] was supposed to be about the people being hunted.” Arthur Aviles, interview with the author, 21 February 2013.

56. Jones, 214.

57. Ibid.

58. Yarborough, 65.

59. Spillers, Hortense J., Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 184–5Google Scholar.

60. Spillers's larger argument concerns the sentimental logic of the text and how this logic renders subjecthood problematic for any of the female characters, though most especially for the “captive woman.”

61. Jones, 214.

62. It is important to say that this is a perceived lack of tension. A skilled performer is able to exercise great control over the body in order to give the impression of an utter lack of control. Thus I am not claiming here that Saffrin as a dancer has no tension in her limbs but rather that Eliza 4 as a character has a baseline of minimal tension.

63. Gaddis, 116.

64. Berlant, Lauren, “Poor Eliza,” American Literature 70.3 (1998): 635–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 642.

65. My account of the last moments of this section both agrees with and departs from Jones's description in his autobiography. According to many of the dancers I interviewed, the work was cut in significant ways both after the BAM premiere (which I viewed in the company's archives at New York Live Arts) and during its tour. Thus, the version recounted in Jones's book may seem in some ways to be distinct from the version I watched. Many similarities, of course, remain.

66. Stowe, 18.

67. Ibid., 21.

68. Ibid.

69. “With her [private] room came the mission to write what became America's best-known novel, and the mission fell to her, she believed, because she was a mother”; Ammons, 161.

70. Ibid., 167, 174.

71. Melissa Blanco-Borelli reminds us that matrilineal networks are also implicated in the circulation of what she terms the “mulata-product,” and thus Stowe's assumption of the immaculateness of maternal affection was in fact much messier: “when negotiations for plaçage took place, it was a mother, an aunt . . . who took charge of the young mulata and made the arrangements with the white man. A matrilineal, matri-focal, or woman-centered production of knowledge circulated the mulata-product in these libidinal market economies.” Blanco-Borelli, “Hip Work: Undoing the Tragic Mulata,” in Black Performance Theory, ed. DeFrantz, Thomas F. and Gonzalez, Anita (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 63–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 79.

72. Jones, 215.

73. Gregg Hubbard, interview with the author, 3 February 2013.

74. Murphy, 96.

75. Hubbard interview.

76. Hubbard echoed this perception of Jones's mortality, but from the point of view of the dance and critical communities of the time, claiming that presenters and sponsors sensed the immediacy of the work because “they didn't expect the company to survive [Zane's death], Bill to survive. Every piece we were really dancing for our lives.” Hubbard interview.

77. Jones, 205.

78. Quoted in R. J. Campbell, “A Test of Faith: Choreographer Bill T. Jones Confronts Religion, Racism and AIDS in The Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin,” Los Angeles Times, 10 March 1991, 5.

79. Seán Curran, interview with the author, 19 February 2013.

80. Gallagher, 20.