Discussing beauty with Bill T. over tea.

NEW YORK CITY--It's a very hot July afternoon in Manhattan, and choreographer Bill T. Jones and I are in a small cafe in midtown sharing a pot of iced herbal tea. "Beauty is what I'm doing right now," says Jones, "something that is elemental and elegant."

Calm and cogent, Jones is referring to his new piece, We Set Out Early . . . Visibility Was Poor, which has its New York premiere this month at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, October 6 to 11, then tours to Berkeley, California, October 14 to 18; Lawrence, Kansas, October 19 and 20; and Ann Arbor, Michigan, October 21 to 25; then heads to Europe. In the work, the forty-six-year-old choreographer, whose awards have included a 1994 MacArthur "genius" fellowship, two New York Dance and Performance (Bessie) Awards, an honorary doctorate from Bard College in 1996, and a 1993 Dance Magazine Award, is departing, at least for a while, from his customary politics and is putting his "faith in art. I must admit run making a philosophical shift to a very old principal about dance." Jones, paraphrasing Martha Graham, explains--"Dance doesn't lie."

Jones's recent subject, if beauty or art can be called simply subjects, is something of a change. In the past ten years, his company, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, has built a reputation for being controversial, beginning with 1990's Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land, which magnifies the issues of race and discrimination in America within a setting of mixed-media theater and dance. His creative perception of the terminally ill in the 1993 Still/Here garnered a plethora of press backlash, begun by writer Arlene Croce's New Yorker article that questioned whether the work was "victim art," and therefore impossible to review. But the success of his past works is a testament to the power of collective consciousness; they speak of today's issues, from one person's point of view.

"Some of those pieces were about the issue of saying, `Can you see me?' They were about identity and feelings," explains Jones. "Now I feel I'm alive; I can be seen; I'm a real player. Now I invite you to come and look at what I find beautiful."

So what is beautiful to Jones? On the table between us is a teapot; to explain, he puts his hand on it. "What does it mean when you sit and look at a beautiful teapot? I know it's a very effete attitude from a person who is supposed to be so politically minded, but I want to understand what gives a teapot its ability to make you stop dead and look at it. What did that craftsman imbue it with?"

With a cast of ten, We Set Out Early opens on a bare setting, yet the movement suggests a pastoral, folkish sensibility--it feels like Sunday morning. It has the effect generated by an Andrew Wyeth painting. A woman wearing a long dress prances onto the stage while a trio and soloist perform; soon the dancers join hands and playfully interact, performing as a group or a family. Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale, a jaunty, impish score comprised of many short folk and tango pieces, accompanies movements and gestures that pass like photographs slowly held before one's eyes. As the first movement nears its end, the dancers take a moment to rejoice, yelling and talking among themselves.

In the second movement there is a severe change: suddenly the audience is looking through peepholes at the characters in their secret world, a world of solitude and introspection, of self-examination and self-absorption. Lighting designer Robert Wierzel offers only scant illumination of this world by way of single thin beams of light which the dancers step into or out of. The music consists of John Cage's Empty Words, Sonata, and Music for Marcel Duchamp, a somber, avant-garde score filled with seemingly unfinished melody lines.

After the second section, the last movement is a shock--it's Jones at his cinematic best. The curtain rises, revealing a bright blue backdrop, and the lights come up blazing. Overhead hangs a steel cart, minus a horse. Dancers run onto the stage, their movements bold and powerful but melancholic. A wrenching score by Lithuanian composer Peteris Vasks called Stimmen, which Jones refers to as "frightening, painful," gives weight to the evening's denouement. There is a celebration happening, but it is different from that of the first movement. Another change has overcome the dancers, and the choreography seems to suggest that they ask "Who are we now? We've changed, but what has changed?"

Clocking in at seventy minutes, We Set Out Early is succinct and poignant. "I was thinking of a theater evening," says Jones. "If I were to watch a piece with no intermission, what would I need from that piece? I'd need something that really brought me into it, then let me rest, quietly meditative, and then suddenly something very emotional. That's why I say it's about a journey."

At moments, Jones's musings seem more like those of a preoccupied writer or a tormented composer than a choreographer. He uses words like character and plot, and mentions first and second movements, sonata form. Yet it all makes sense in the context of the piece. We Set Out Early has no spoken word, no video, no multimedia element, and while constructed like a story, it is different than something like Last Supper or Still/Here. "I was always using a similar process in those pieces, like, what if I took this character from a novel and did it as four different characters?" Jones declares. "Some people say We Set Out Early is more about the how of the subject than the what."

Jones explains that his creative process involved a combination of improvising, following his body's natural movement, giving himself over to the music, and having faith in his instincts as a dancer. He relied on his own body's encyclopedia of movement language to speak up and tell the story and to evoke joy and sadness. In it Jones finds a narrative that he continues throughout the piece, carrying the audience along from emotion to emotion. "The idea is to capture myself thinking and feeling," he says. "I look at my own contribution in today's dance world, and I think my own body has information in it, so I try to capture that within the music's universe."

Jones admits he's a romantic. His use of formal structure, themes, variations, and movements is evident and enables him to communicate abstract ideas clearly, giving voice to issues that might otherwise be evanescent. "I'm trying to use them at the service of a wild and woolly sensibility," he says.

Before leaving, Jones relates one last thought: he tells of seeing ballerinas leaving the American Ballet Theatre rehearsal studios that day. He explains that he was thinking of how the dancer is an instrument, and that the dancer is trained to be the muse of some genius. "But doesn't that make them anonymous?" he asks. Jones raises the subject of identity, asking, "Who is this person that is making this piece? What is his background, his vocabulary, his race, his sexual preference, and what do we need to know about him to understand his work? And, what do we need to know about an artist who is trying to express beauty?" Most definitely, Jones is asking audiences--and himself--these questions.