American Dance Festival Bill T Jones/Arnie Zane Company Review

In the center of the stage, a single dancer stands at attention, facing stage left. They are bathed in the afterglow of another single dancer’s frenetic spill stage right—a hysterical outburst that came and went so quickly it registers like a non-sensical dream sequence. Slowly, the dancer (Mak Thorniest — identified in the program notes as The Clock) turns their head towards us ever so slowly and then looks straightforward again. Moving slow, slow, slow— a bent arm pinned to torso pivots backwards, and then quickly folds in sync with their head returning to front gazing still.

As this sequence repeats another gesture is added—- the hand is folded reminding of a duck bill. The hand dips and dips, like a waterbird scoring fish food, and then in a lunge the dancer’s arms flap like a seabird taking flight.

A second dancer joins making the same movements and then a third. A final gesture of arms crossing into an X while the dancers make a short hiss sound is added. Meanwhile, dancers with the same energy as the initial hysteric solo, streak across the stage— 5, 7, 10, a dozen, we can’t help but lose count. They are a flock, growing in number and with each repetition inching closer to stage left. Arms fly high, stomping marches and more dancers— they face east, west, south, north…. We feel direction.

We learn from the New York Live Arts website (the current incarnation of Bill T. Jones Dance) that this first dance, Continuous Replay, is an ensemble remake of a work originally choreographed by Jones’ late partner Arnie Zane. Zane, a photographer by training, constructed the dance from 45 gestures that are complicated as the score progresses. For this reviewer, a newcomer to this work, it is almost impossible to conceive of Continuous Replay as a solo work because of how the ensemble movement intrigues as it intensifies. At the end, it seemed as if someone ripped the cover off a cuckoo clock to let us admire the mechanical ballet of clock parts moving time forward.

Story/ unleashes nine dancers to dominate our senses as they pair in duets, meld into grouplets of four, or peel off into solos, or roll over each other’s crouching bodies. They align to remind of a centipede shedding its shell. They slide to cover the entire stage as though making home runs just before the catcher tags them. There is a ball, that appears from time to time in one dancer’s hand or another, much like a Times Square hustler challenging us to find the peanut under their slight of hand shell game.

From the ADF program — and from the mysterious call out voice we hear from time to time— we learn that the sequence of this dance is actually random per the John Cage idea of Indeterminacy. You too might find the complexity of Story/ breathtaking. It’s as though we are watching a 3D chess game come to life with the fourth dimension of time sometimes speeding and sometimes decelerating. Juxtaposed to the Schubert’s passionate score— random though it may be— we realize that every time there is a number greater than one, there is a Story/ being told.

It strikes this reviewer to be not just one Story/, but rather a saga, or more precisely, a saga that we hope will never end.

Photos: Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company: "Continuous Replay" (1977/1991), Bates Dance Festival 2025, photo by Olivia Moon; "Story/" (2013), Live Artery Festival at New York Live Arts 2026. Photo by Maria Baranova, Courtesy New York Live Arts