BILL T. JONES.

BILL T. JONES ZELLERBACH HALL, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA JANUARY 21, 2000

In the middle of The Breathing Show, an evening of connected solos and a remarkable film, Bill T. Jones appears as one multicolored skeleton, stripped clean of flesh and muscle. Long after it's been executed, his movement in Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar's digital film clings to the air like dense, sun-pierced clouds of chalk dust. "Ghostcatching" is a stark reminder that Jones has always welcomed the spectral.

There's the inclusion of his late partner in the company's name, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. The skeletons in the closet of American history are called out as witnesses in Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land (1990). And there are the patients afflicted with life-threatening illnesses in Still/Here (1994), where dubious futures slide backward into the present.

But in these funky, precise, pleasing, and elliptical solos, absence is at the center of the dancing itself, not just in the idea of the company, the ideas of the dances, the impending facts of the performers. The aptly named Breathing Show opens Jones's solid body to surrounding air.

The dancer-choreographer peppers his accompaniment--by Schubert, Mozart, Rodgers and Hart, contemporary composer Daniel Roumain--with his own sung and spoken snatches. The first time we hear the recurring refrain, "North, south, east, west/I am building paradise," he has just finished a long, vigorous sequence and is breathing hard. The sliding, circling, arcing, swift shifts in direction that have brought his breath up hard and fast are the building blocks for Eden.

Directions don't matter when you're in paradise because you've arrived--there's nowhere else you want to be. But when you're constructing Eden from the outside in--from east of Eden, from the badlands you've been scattered to--then north, south, east, and west are the flawed points of a compass you have no choice but to travel from, making your way back to freedom. In The Breathing Show, Jones's gorgeous, limbs are those imperfect territories. Voluptuous hips stir legs in counterclockwise circles, and shoulders roll obliquely toward the heart; starting on his periphery, Jones moves inward. He pours into his body the space he's gathered up, creating a sweet, airy garden.

When Jones travels across the wide expanse of the stage, he is no more inside the music than inside the movement. He is, instead, next to it, so as not to succumb to its illusion of being definite and bounded, so as not to defeat his progress toward an Eden only as substantial as air or the little ditty he sings about an old gray goose who's mourned and missed.

In Buddhism you breathe to get rid of the barriers between inside and out, self and other, to stop imagining yourself as a self. The Breathing Show is that kind of a show. Its questions are elemental: How do you dance on a stage crowded with emptiness? How do you operate in a life more full of musing and memory than of tangible fact?