Deep Blue Sea, Bill T. Jones, Elizabeth Diller/Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Janet Wong, The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, Nick Hallet, Peter Nigrini, Robert Wierzel, Park Avenue Armory, New York City, April 2020. Cancelled due to Covid-19.
Originally published in Issue No. 12
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Before the coronavirus crisis, several leading talents—including dancer-choreographer Bill T. Jones, architect Elizabeth Diller, and composer Nick Hallett– coalesced to create (what would have been) the newest show at the Park Avenue Armory, Deep Blue Sea.
The piece explores the interplay of “single and group identities” through a spatial composition of dance, sound, and light set within the fifty-five-thousand-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall. Jones’s visionary work combined text from both Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech and Herman Melville’s famed novel Moby Dick with “body performance” choreography to create intimacy in a monumental space. Ultimately, Jones sought to construct an event that a racially diverse audience could identify themselves within. The piece would include not only members of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, but also 80 community members in its choreography. As the rehearsal spaces of Deep Blue Sea scaled-up in size, the politics of the piece continued to develop—and haven’t stopped—despite the show’s cancellation due to the pandemic.
“I began this piece in pain,” Jones said during a Zoom-broadcasted salon featuring the creative team behind Deep Blue Sea. “I am a black man in the white avant-garde . . . and as I paced around the rehearsal space at MASS MoCA, I asked myself, how can I talk about loneliness?” The isolated, floating faces comprising a Brady Bunch–style video grid of salon participants nodded—partially in acknowledgment of the vital conversation surrounding race and the arts, and partially in recognition of a collective loneliness extending beyond Deep Blue Sea’s planned run and into our shelter-in-place reality.
“Even the Armory isn’t big enough to really understand that condition of abandonment,” said Diller. “And we saw the choreography adjust to its many rehearsal spaces.” Now Deep Blue Sea, which was designed to be performed in a large space with a diverse collective of 80-plus performers in conjunction with a large communal audience, must adjust to its most challenging space yet: the flat plane of a screen.
Reviewing Deep Blue Sea from the words of its creators on Zoom, rather than viewing the piece itself at the Armory, shifts the source of criticism away from any physical manifestation of art toward the very ideas from which the art derived. While the untimely cancellation of Deep Blue Sea can be thought of as another piece of creative collateral damage associated with the coronavirus, its non-existence keeps the work aligned with its message. As Melville wrote, “It is not down on any map; true places never are.”
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Gina Ciancone is a strategist trained at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and Columbia University. Her work is based on the premise that art and culture are essential to the future vitality of cities.
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