Dance Documentary Focuses on People Facing Mortality

NEW YORK —  The curious thing about this dance documentary is that no knowledge of dance, or any interest in it, is needed for the viewer to find it engrossing.

Granted, “Bill T. Jones: Still/Here” offers a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of a dance work (the celebrated “Still/Here” by choreographer-dancer Jones). But the film, which airs on PBS tonight, even more brilliantly shines a light on people struggling with life’s most fundamental mystery: mortality.

“The thing that makes this film different than a show on PBS about health or therapy,” Jones says, “is that there was an artist making this one, and he is asking questions about mortality in the way an artist would ask them. That puts an interesting spin on it.”

Helping with that spin were Jones’ collaborators: Bill Moyers, a veteran journalist who shared thoughtful exchanges with Jones that centered much more on life and death than on dance steps, and the film’s executive producer, David Grubin, among whose many works are PBS documentaries on U.S. presidents, including “FDR,” “LBJ” and the forthcoming “Truman.”

“Usually, a choreographer is going to create a dance in his mind, then work with his dancers to explain what he imagined,” Grubin notes. “But this time, Bill T. Jones did a funny thing. He went out into the world and said to people, ‘Show me how you express pain or happiness or desires or fears. But don’t tell me just in words. Show me with a gesture.’

“Then he took those gestures to his dancers, who embroidered on those movements and constructed a dance out of them.”

Like the finished dance, the film addresses people who are not sick, dispensing the accumulated wisdom of others facing death.

* “Bill T. Jones: Still/Here” airs at 10 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28.