Bill T. Jones's 'Chapel/Chapter': Morbidity in Motion

No one is better at mixing mediums onstage than Bill T. Jones. Like a medieval alchemist, he puts together strange ingredients and, in his case, comes up with gold. In his fascinating "Chapel/Chapter," a soprano chants the distilled version of a grisly murder. Church bells send a horde of butterflies flitting across a video screen. Not every action makes sense, but the effect is marvelously unsettling.

Disturbing the audience is exactly what Jones and his 10-member Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company were aiming for in this masterpiece of a multimedia work, which was premiered a little over a year ago and was performed for the first time in this area Saturday at the George Mason Center for the Arts. The work's premise is clear (even if the way it is presented isn't). Jones asks: "How can this event suggest the uneasy distance our mediatized era helps create between the passive observers we are and the disturbing, sometimes incomprehensible 'news items' we encounter every day?"

First performed in a small space, the work originally wiped out the emotional distance a television screen creates by seating the audience onstage alongside re-creations of two terrible murders. Since the premiere, the work has been adapted to proscenium stages for easier touring.

Saturday, some of the audience was seated in church pews on the stage. Others were spread out in the theater's vast space, and Jones made them feel equally distraught through other means. He would repeat a brutal story, for example. In the second telling, you knew the facts and dreaded hearing them again. In the third telling, that dread sat like a lump in your throat and you squirmed until it was over.

The dancers "tell" three stories. One is the murder of a family of four, another the murder of a little girl by her stepfather, and then a confession by a company member. At the end there is also a description of four Marines being brought home in caskets.

Jones saves this work from sagging under its grim theme in several ways. He wisely provides frequent and intermittent relief through energetic, upbeat sections, and he breaks this 70-minute (no intermission) work up into many segments of a few minutes each. He also tells the three stories in bits and pieces, extending the dramatic tension.

All too often, multimedia works by choreographers fall flat because the dancers sound awful when they speak, or because what works well in the mind of the conceiver doesn't work at all onstage. Jones is the exception: His dancers can act, the actors can move, and the music is able to dramatize to concepts.