Bill T. Jones’ moving tribute to mother-in-law
Thirteen years ago, in 2003, the choreographer Bill T. Jones recorded an oral history of his 95-year-old mother-in-law, a Jewish activist and nurse who joined the resistance in German-occupied Vichy, France, during World War II.
Rather it is a story, like millions of others from that war, of circumstance and character yielding unheralded acts of endurance, resourcefulness and courageous moral calculus.
Yes, she was saving children and what adults she and her comrades could in the stark, euphemistically named “assigned residences” where Jews were held before a possible deportation to a German extermination camp.
An eloquent nine-member ensemble cast, clad in trousers and jerseys in a muted color palette, shares equally the spoken and choreographic tasks.
In repeated feats of communal ingenuity, they use simple geometric panels to build bedrooms and bunkers, inviting doorways and bomb sites.
Even when they are separated and spread across the stage, the dancers seem interlocked, flexing their arms like disembodied machines, extending an extravagant long leg or overtaken by full-body shiverings that register as deep sympathetic vibrations.
The clarity allows her own family’s episodes of separation and loss to play off against the larger canvas to telling effect.
“Analogy,” whose full title refers to the harsh mountainous terrain of the French Pyrenees, plays out across a wide musical landscape.