Dancer-choreographer uses movement to tell struggles faced by Dora Amelan in World War II
There’s nothing unusual about dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones appearing onstage.
But the venue for his appearance Wednesday night might be something of a first. Mr. Jones will be speaking at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in lower Manhattan alongside Dora Amelan, his 95-year-old Jewish mother-in-law.
The subject is Ms. Amelan’s life during World War II and how her hardship helped inspired Mr. Jones’s work “Analogy/Dora: Tramontane.”
Ms. Amelan wasn’t in a concentration camp. But she spent the war in France as a nurse and social worker for an underground Jewish organization, toiling in Vichy internment camps.
The piece “Analogy” has its roots in oral history, said Mr. Jones, who is married to Ms. Amelan’s son, Bjorn Amelan, the creative director of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company.
Over the past couple of decades, the couple has sat around with other family members, listening to Ms. Amelan tell her stories.
“Some of the stories they never heard before,” Mr. Jones remembered when we met last week between rehearsals at New York Live Arts, a nonprofit dance organization where Mr. Jones serves as artistic director. “I thought it would be a gift to do an oral history of their mother.”
“Tramontane” refers to the arid, cold wind that whipped through the internment camps.
I’ll be interested to see how the evening goes.
Mr. Jones, Ms. Amelan and her son will be joined onstage by Julie Burstein, the author of “Spark: How Creativity Works,” who has made a specialty of interviewing original thinkers.
Mr. Jones emphasized that Ms. Amelan’s story served as the impetus for his work, rather than as a blueprint.
Indeed, “Analogy/Dora: Tramontane” is only the first part of a trilogy; the second part, “Analogy/Lance: Pretty aka the Escape Artist,” highlights Mr. Jones’s nephew, Lance, a hustler whose war zone wasn’t the battlefields of Europe but the club culture and sex trade of the late ’80s and early ’90s.
However, my hunch is that, as accomplished an artist as Mr. Jones is—he received the National Medal of Arts in 2013 and was a 1994 MacArthur Fellow—the audience will be more interested in the burden that his mother-in-law carried so many decades ago.
Mr. Jones said Ms. Amelan paid him the ultimate compliment after she saw “Analogy/Dora:Tramontane.” She told him “you kept it so simple,” Mr. Jones recalled. “Dora says that the problem she has with a lot of works about the Holocaust is they try to do too much.”
The pleasure of getting together with an artist of Mr. Jones’ caliber, beyond watching him run a dance rehearsal—“The less the better; just one or two gestures,” he firmly instructed one of his dancers—is that you can toss out any question, no matter how big without fear that he hasn’t already thought it through.
“Dora,” and people like her, he said, almost thinking out loud, “did they leave a mark on the world? As a working artist, you’re always attempting to leave a mark on the world with the knowledge the world’s indifferent.”
I couldn’t agree more. But then why do it? I have my own theories.
“That’s the perversity of it,” he said. “Artists are perverse.
“Art making is participating in the world of ideas,” he went on. “I love ideas. I love civilization. And I believe in civilization.”
There’s probably no more emphatic statement of that belief than taking the experiences of your Jewish mother-in-law and telling them through movement.
Actually there is. The mere fact that Dora Amelan is around at 95 to tell her own tale. My hunch is that Mr. Jones might not get a word in edgewise Wednesday evening.
—Ralph.Gardner@wsj.com