Dance Review: “What Problem?” — Bill T. Jones’s Angel of History
November 6, 2022

By Debra Cash for ArtsFuse

The struggle is to define what the problem is — and to allow the questions to have big, destabilizing, and more honest answers.

Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company in What Problem? Co-presented by FirstWorks and Brown Arts Institute at Brown University, at the VETS, Providence, November 4.

Bill T. Jones has long been as much a soothsayer as a choreographer. As What Problem? opens, Jones, still muscular and arrestingly handsome perching behind a metal music stand, begins to speak in tongues. My ear reached for meaning but the speech was a shattered mix of phrases, religious quotations, and the lyrics to America (My Country ‘Tis of Thee). It sounded as if the original had been translated from an unfamiliar language while retaining its peculiar syntax.

Jones was reading a speech he had first experienced as an 11-year-old at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963: Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speechBut he was reciting it backwards, with the words in retrograde. Jones’s speech resembled nothing so much as Walter Benjamin’s stunned angel of history:

Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Jones’s dancers begin to appear as the scrambled text ends, walking, humming, striking luxuriant stretching poses, inhabiting all the time in the world. Then Jones begins to tell another story, a comprehensible one, about the character Pip in Moby Dick, a “forgotten” icon of the weak, Black entertainer. Back in high school when he was first assigned the book, Jones shares, he didn’t take much notice of Pip — but now, he muses, he finds that the role of the “Black exceptional one” is disquieting and all too relevant…

Read the full review here.

City of Providence Announces 2024 PVDFest Dates

City of Providence Announces 2024 PVDFest Dates

Creative Capital’s Signature Event Returns Downtown September 2024    PROVIDENCE, RI – Mayor Brett P. Smiley ...
FirstWorks and Small Island Big Song on The Rhode Show

FirstWorks and Small Island Big Song on The Rhode Show

FirstWorks' Kathleen Pletcher and Small Island Big Song co-producer BaoBao Chen join host Brendan Kirby on the ...
Indigenous Musicians from the Blue Continent Unite to Sing for our Changing Seas

Indigenous Musicians from the Blue Continent Unite to Sing for our Changing Seas

  International performance collective Small Island Big Song spotlights Pacific and Indian Ocean island ...
Save the Date for FirstWorks’ 20th Anniversary Celebration!

Save the Date for FirstWorks’ 20th Anniversary Celebration!

We are just days away from 2024, which marks FirstWorks 20th Anniversary! We look forward to celebrating this ...
Read FirstWorks’ 2022-23 Annual Report

Read FirstWorks’ 2022-23 Annual Report

Read our 2022-2023 Annual Report and see what YOU have made possible! This year the FirstWorks annual report is ...
Review: Rennie Harris’ ‘Rome and Jewels’: Keeping hallowed works vital

Review: Rennie Harris’ ‘Rome and Jewels’: Keeping hallowed works vital

By Kathryn Boland for Dance Informa Magazine Veterans Memorial Auditorium, Providence, RI. November 18, ...
From NYE to All-Year Arts, FirstWorks Looks Back

From NYE to All-Year Arts, FirstWorks Looks Back

by Ken Abrams for Providence Monthly “It’s kind of amazing,” says FirstWorks founder and executive director ...
FirstWorks Brings Longest Running Street Dance Touring Company in American History to Providence for Performance and Free Community Events

FirstWorks Brings Longest Running Street Dance Touring Company in American History to Providence for Performance and Free Community Events

Rennie Harris Puremovement American Street Dance Theater Re-mounts Epic Hip-Hop Masterwork ‘Rome & Jewels’ at ...
FirstWorks Premieres Multimedia Performance Installation from MASARY Studios During ‘Three Nights of Lights’ Winter Spectacle at historic Grace Church

FirstWorks Premieres Multimedia Performance Installation from MASARY Studios During ‘Three Nights of Lights’ Winter Spectacle at historic Grace Church

Dynamic lighting, 'spatialized' sound and video projections create immersive experience open to the public the ...
Hip-Hop Spin on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to Open FirstWorks’ 20th Anniversary Season

Hip-Hop Spin on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to Open FirstWorks’ 20th Anniversary Season

Celebrated Street Dance Choreographer Rennie Harris Presents: Rome & Jewels Marking its Rhode Island Premiere ...
Mayor Smiley, FirstWorks Unveil PVDFest 2023 Headliners

Mayor Smiley, FirstWorks Unveil PVDFest 2023 Headliners

Civil rights icon and Grammy Lifetime Achievement award-winner Mavis Staples performing at Innovation Park ...
Read FirstWorks’ Spring 2023 Newsletter

Read FirstWorks’ Spring 2023 Newsletter

See highlights from FirstWorks’ Spring 2023 programs! FirstWorks’ newsletter highlights extraordinary programs ...