Still Here.

During 1994, Bill T. Jones could boast of a New Yorker profile, a Time cover story, a New York Times Magazine feature, designation as resident choreographer of Lyon Opera Ballet, and a $265,000 MacArthur fellowship. His cup ran comfortably over.

Before reaching the stage, Still/Here, his latest work, went through a public gestation process in fourteen locales. Jones made a well-publicized journey to conduct amateur group therapy sessions (called "survival workshops") with clusters of terminally ill people.

He seems to find inspiration in pain and death made public. For example, every dancegoer is aware of the AIDS-related demise of Jones's partner, Arnie Zane, and of Jones's own HIV-positive status. But in Still/Here, the process turned out to be more persuasive than the resulting dance. A work of art should offer insight beyond the circumstances that set it in motion. I missed this insight in Jones's choreography.

During the journey, his collaborators were armed with microphones and videotapes. Individual testimonies and shots of thin faces and sparse hair occupied Gretchen Bender's sensitively filmed and boldly manipulated video interpretation; and I was often touched by the recorded voice of Odetta, so scratchy-sweet as she sang the heartfelt lyrics of Kenneth Frazelle during the first half of Still/Here. (Vernon Reid's score for the second half was more tumultuous but less affecting.)

Videotape and music succeeded in transmuting the raw material into fresh form, while the choreography rarely did. It dealt mostly in spatial arrangement. As groups of dancers shifted about, individuals or small units briefly separated from them. Dancers supported their partners in a literal way that recalled the Boys Town slogan, "He ain't heavy, Father, he's my brother." Three men formed a pieta; another one simply stood and let the screen images mesmerize him.

Now and then a moment of fierce vitality was ignited, as though the dancer had made a personal discovery without choreographic intervention. In one of these, a diminutive firebrand named Josie Coyoc spun a passage so wild that she seemed possessed.

But most often five peripatetic video screens appeared more in command of the stage than did the dancers. Blown-up hearts undulated almost mysteriously; faces exploded into fragments; and Jones, who didn't dance, could be heard talking benignly as a TV monitor showing his picture traveled about.

Through all of this, we began to see dance, not as the transcendent medium it can be, but as a sort of cement into which the sounds and images were gradually embedded.

The devoted artists of Jones's company poured their passion and individuality into everything they were given to do. Somehow the dance refused to soar beyond the impressions of that initial fourteen-day junket. Jones has yet to stare death in the face the way Kurt Jooss did in The Green Table.