LAST SUPPER AT UNCLE TOM’S CABIN/THE PROMISED LAND
Bill T. Jones’s Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land is a sprawling, ambitious dance about racism, repression, faith, and sexual freedom. But unlike the family-saga novels sold in supermarkets that are invariably described as “sprawling” and “ambitious,” Jones’s dance is a work of intelligence and commitment whose radical aesthetics confront the audience. Simply said, it is a masterpiece. In our alienated time Jones actually offers a vision of a promised land. And his utopia does not have the harsh regulations that Plato, More, and Lenin found it necessary to impose; Jones’s promised land is the body, freed from the prejudices that sometimes seem society’s currency.
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Jones goes through Uncle Tom’s Cabin at lightning speed, a technique that limits the novel’s melodramatic appeal. Most of the dancing takes place in a small, striped tent, as if it were part of a minstrel show. (Because the Civic Theatre’s proscenium is draped in the same striped material, the entire dance is like a coon show being offered for our amusement.) Most of the dancers wear cartoonish masks; Simon Legree’s looks like a gorilla face. Harriet Beecher Stowe (Sage Cowles) narrates the story from outside the tent, while guest artist R. Justice Allen both narrates and supplies a black man’s ironic counternarrative; in a telling moment, Justice stops one of Stowe’s abolitionist sermons. Because of the narrative focus of this section, Jones limits movement to gestures and to a “Jim Crow dance” like a buck dancer’s shuffle.
In the fragmented narrative style typical of postmodern dance, Jones then turns from the story of Uncle Tom’s Cabin to explore the point of view of one of its characters. Eliza, the runaway slave, is the only slave who became free. He imagines the dogs that pursue her as men in black T-shirts, boots, and dance belts, wearing dogs’ muzzles. Like jar heads at boot camp, they run in place and do calisthenics. At first the muzzles are funny and the men’s bare buttocks are sexy, but as the connection between slave hunters’ dogs and Marines sinks in, the image becomes threatening.
Though the constant movement keeps our interest, this is the weakest section. The material suggests conventional religious ideas–the relentless repetition of the chair dance suggests death’s relentlessness, basketball suggests boyhood innocence, Allen’s rap suggests God’s ultimate justice–but they are not new or interesting ideas. The final image is Jesus’s resignation in the Garden of Gethsemane: man’s injustice to man is an implacable force.
When the lights rise again, a scene from The Dutchman, by Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), is played on the table; Lula, an older white woman (Sage Cowles), tries to seduce Clay, a young black man (Allen), in Jones’s ultimate power struggle between blacks and whites. Lula calls Clay an “Uncle Tom” because he won’t have sex with her; Clay replies, “If I’m a middle-class fake white man . . . let me be. And let me be in the way I want.” As 30 dancers pound out a rhythm on the floor, Allen comes directly to the audience to say “You never see the pure heart, the pumping black heart. . . . I sit here, in this buttoned-up suit, to keep from cutting all your throats. I mean wantonly.” The violence of Clay’s speech at first seems excessive, but the pounding rhythms seem to justify it as an exemplary literary expression of black anger. Of course, Lula kills Clay and turns her attention to an even younger black man.
