STILL HERE, STILL ESSENTIAL

The tour of Bill T. Jones’s landmark dance
comes to Royce Hall with undiminished force

The first time I saw Still/Here, it was at BAM. It was 1994, the year of Stonewall’s 25th Anniversary and The Gay Games in NYC. So, yes, there was celebrating, but the AIDS epidemic was still ripping through my circle of friends, and the theater felt less like a venue than a vigil. I remember walking out altered. Not because the piece was sentimental—it isn’t—but because it was fearless. It asked us to look at mortality without flinching, and to find movement inside that reckoning.

On March 5 at Royce Hall, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company brings this era-defining work back into the present, where it belongs.

Premiered in 1994 at BAM’s Next Wave Festival (and revived there in 2024), Still/Here was born during one of the most terrifying cultural moments in modern American history. Jones, himself HIV-positive and grieving the loss of his artistic and life partner Arnie Zane, built the work around a series of “Survival Workshops: Talking and Moving about Life and Death,” conducted with people living with life-threatening illness. Their words, gestures, and images became the DNA of the piece.

But while the work emerged from the AIDS crisis, its reach is far wider. At its heart, Still/Here asks: What do we owe the dying? What can they teach the living? Thirty years later—after another pandemic, amid a fresh new war in the mid-East, climate anxiety, and technological vertigo—those questions feel less historical than immediate.

Formally, the piece is a two-act multimedia tapestry: spoken text, video portraits, abstract gesture, and rigorously structured choreography. The visual environment, originally conceived by Gretchen Bender, remains haunting and precise. Music by Kenneth Frazelle (with traditional material associated with Odetta) and Vernon Reid pulses through the evening, anchoring the work in something both intimate and expansive. Longtime collaborators Liz Prince (costumes) and Robert Wierzel (lighting) help shape a stage picture that is both ceremonial and unadorned.

What makes Still/Here endure is its refusal to manipulate. The participants from those Survival Workshops are not subjects—they are co-authors. Their gestures inform the choreography. Their words become lyrics. Their images frame the stage. The piece exists to honor them, but it does so without sanctimony. It is clear-eyed, structured, and unsentimental. It is also profoundly moving.

CAP UCLA is marking the occasion with a full evening experience. Pre- and post-performance activities begin at 6:30 p.m., including a live set by DJ Narasimha, art-making, film, poetry, and spoken word. Music and dancing continue after the show—because survival, in Jones’s vocabulary, is not quiet endurance. It is presence.

The work tours nationally, but, having been a long-time member of ACT UP Los Angeles, there’s something about seeing Still/Here now—at Royce Hall, in this cultural moment—that feels urgent. When I saw it at BAM, I felt surrounded by loss. This time, I expect to feel something else: the recognition that survival itself is a form of choreography.

Some works fade into their era. Still/Here remains, stubbornly and beautifully, here.

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photos by Joanna Savio

Still/Here
Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company
Royce Hall, UCLA
March 5, 2026 at 8
pre- and post-performance activities begin at 6:30
2 hours with one 15-minute intermission
for tickets, visit CAP UCLA
tour continues; for dates and cities, visit Bill T. Jones

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