Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company
Collage Revisited (1988, 2025), Story/ (2013)
New York Live Arts
January 10–12, 2026
New York
History of Collage debuted in May 1988—a month after Arnie Zane died on March 30, 1988, of AIDS-related lymphoma. Originally staged at New Contemporary Masters Festival at City Center, Collage Revisited, performed at New York Live Arts as part of the Live Artery festival, honors Bill T. Jones and Zane’s last collaboration nearly forty years later. The “legacy project” retraces the company’s lineage and carries Zane’s influence into the present.
“Dreams Freud dreamed. Or dreams Freud dreamed Freud dreamed.”
These words begin in darkness as a constellation of small string lights cast dappled shadows across the stage. Cricket chirps blend with increasingly garbled dialogue as dancers cut horizontally across the space, rapidly building momentum. Moving on and off stage in swift bursts, the dancers form overlapping duets, trios, and quartets. Spanning the space’s entirety, these group phrases share a fluid movement quality with sharp edges. Their varying tempos create a feeling of simultaneous yet distinct timelines or scenes. With each reentry and constant costume changes, the performers inhabit different worlds and characters. Barrington Hinds is the only unchanging role, in a black suit and black sneakers throughout the forty-minute piece. The rest of the company switches between preppy sweaters, flowy dresses, red lingerie, lace slips, fur coats, and plain white briefs.
There is hardly a moment of stillness throughout the duration of Collage Revisited. The performers sustain precise forms, luxurious extensions, and direct focus. The music becomes unintelligible, plummeting the audience into its dreamscape. Beyond the score’s inclusion of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, Collage Revisited encapsulates the chaos of the unconscious, at once recognizable and nonsensical. Characters disappear and reappear unexpectedly and flit between vignettes. Humor shapes the piece’s dreamscape through facial expressions, exaggerated movement, and comically unexpected nudity.
The score by Charles R. Amirkhanian and Blue Gene Tyranny includes distorted recordings of the 1979 White Night Riots (also included in History of Collage). Layered with audio of more recent protests like the 1991 Crown Heights Riot and 2020 George Floyd protests, the more distant and recent pasts form one collage of history. The dancers in this section move in a larger group, embodying urgency and vigor. Their force throughout the piece never wavers, even as, toward the end, the piece ebbs to a slow moment of contact as the company forms a line, hands pressing shoulders.