Good piece by Ginia Bellafante in the Sunday NY Times (9/18; reg. required), on choreographer/dancer Bill T. Jones and his latest work, “Blind Date”:
The last presidential election brought [Jones’s] relatively vague ideas about civil malaise into sharp focus. “I’d really thought that the values of the counterculture were moving more into the mainstream of American life,” Mr. Jones said one recent afternoon. “But the election really proved to me that I was wrong. I’d begun to have a very strong response to this ‘us’ and ‘them’ mentality, and I had become exercised by the kind of discourse we were having in this country.”
He responded not with a screed calling for the dismantling of the Bush White House or the secession of the Northeast. Instead, invoking Bach, he set about to create a work of choreography endorsing the values of the Enlightenment, a piece that would cast a critical eye on what he described as a national atmosphere of “toxic certainty.” And he has done so with a series of segments that question the expediency of war, reflect on limited opportunities for the urban poor and remark on the centrality of sexual moralism to the Republican agenda.
“Toxic certainty.” Saw plenty of it at the Hitchens/Galloway debate the other night. We’ve got to get beyond it.
**Inner voice: But isn’t there such a thing as “nontoxic” certainty?
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