Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company

For a four-week period in August 1994 the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company worked daily with Wexner Center for the Arts technical staff to realize the ambitious scope of Still/Here, a piece that continues to break boundaries between the personal and the political. While the company worked on the live elements of the performance, Jones’s collaborator, the prominent multidisciplinary artist Gretchen Bender, utilized the Wex’s state of the art Moving Image Studio, then called Art and Technology, to assemble the multiscreen video montage that has become a prominent fixture of this piece. Still/Here returned to the Wex on February 18, 1995, after its premiere in Lyon, France; over 30 years later, the Wex is honored to welcome the piece back to the Mershon stage to celebrate the legacy and honor the strength of those living with life-threatening illnesses.

Through spoken word, video portraits, dance, and the abstract nature of gesture, Still/Here pays homage to the participants of the survival workshops held across the country during the project’s initial stages. The participants' generosity of spirit and willingness to express their experiences through words and gesture have always been and remain the essence of Still/Here. Their gestures inform the choreography, their words the lyrics, and their images the stage.

IMAGE CAPTION
Still/Here (2024), photo: Maria Baranova, courtesy New York Live Arts.