Postmodern dance icon Bill. T Jones has brought his newest piece, “Afterwardsness,” to UMass Amherst’s Totman Gym. Upon entering the space, I was immediately struck by the unique configuration of the stage: a star-like shape, comprised of a square of marley at its center, with wide runways extending from each of its corners. Even more notable was the highly integrated placement of the audience in the room: dispersed in the spaces between each of the runaways, filling in the rest of the stage. It looked as though we, too, would be a part of the piece.
The pre-show audience chatter was quickly disrupted when without warning—no dimming of lights, no pre-show announcement—herds of dancers emerged from all corners of the room, raucously banging pots and pans against each other in an unsettling cacophony. As dancers navigated the runways with clean lines, leaps and spiraling torsos, a distant voiceover listed off indiscriminate dates, which would continue intermittently throughout the performance: March 13, 16, all the way to Oct. 18 of the following year. It was with the listing off of these dates that I realized “Afterwardsness” was a pandemic project. Suddenly the disruptive cacophony of pots and pans made beautiful sense; the startling chaos that kickstarted the piece, disrupting the routine pre-show chatter of the audience, was COVID-19, disrupting life as usual. The audience, placed quite literally in the midst of the piece’s mayhem, would reexperience the striking of COVID all over again alongside the dancers, this time through the artistic brilliance of Bill T. Jones.
Titled after Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic concept of “belatedly understanding” former trauma, “Afterwardsness” is a stunning retrospection on the ongoing “twin pandemics:” COVID-19 and the systemic violence inflicted on Black Americans. It is a masterpiece that will make you wish you had multiple sets of eyes—with so many moving parts, it will make you wonder if you sacrificed witnessing one unmissable moment for another.
Cycling through a year—and counting—in the pandemic, the piece is fragmented into various segments, each prompting the audience to reflect on a different aspect of pandemic life. From clever movement motifs that mimicked quarantine activities—singing, crying, shaking out of pure anxiety—to hearty hymns sung by the dancers themselves and impassioned violin solos paying homage to nationwide calls for racial justice, the piece was chock-full of retrospective moments that forced the audience to revisit the anguish of 2020. Even more resonant were Jones’s unassuming costume choices. Each dancer toted their own variation of the sweatpant quarantine attire that many had lived in for a year, a nod to the endless hours spent showcasing only upper bodies on zoom.
Both the musical score and choreography seesawed between periods of an intense, hawkish quality and those of a calm, redemptive air. In those periods of calm it felt almost like the piece would soon resolve, only to be interrupted by more thunderous music and organized chaos, a pattern which seemed to mimic the unpredictable ebbs and flows of an unending pandemic.
The piece itself certainly felt unending at times. One could sense an intentional exhaustion among the dancers, who, with their sharp angles and piercing movements, were constantly in motion from one part of the stage to another. Even in periods of stillness, there was a palpable exhaustion that resembled the laboriousness of waiting through a bleak and uncertain year. By the time Sept. 6 rolled around in the voiceover of dates, the dancers periodically screamed out in frustration as if they had been navigating the stage, and transitively the pandemic, for one date too many. I wanted to scream with them.
Shortly thereafter, the dancers’ cries of utter fatigue were heard as the piece came to a sudden close. Just as the piece had begun, it ended, without warning, as the fluorescent lighting of Totman Gym reappeared. Bill T. Jones, clad in an unassuming outfit topped with an anonymizing hat, stood up from his seat and announced, “That’s all folks.” It was an abrupt and inconclusive ending to an already nonstop piece. I almost wished it had ended with a more distinct conclusion, though it did seem fitting to end a pandemic piece on a note of uncertainty. Even more fitting was what ensued post performance: the dancers circled the room, expressing gratitude to each audience member through their masks, almost as if to say, “Hey, we’re all going through this together.”
