{"id":8016,"date":"2004-01-31T23:58:21","date_gmt":"2004-01-31T23:58:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/dancing_to_flannery.html"},"modified":"2004-01-31T23:58:21","modified_gmt":"2004-01-31T23:58:21","slug":"dancing_to_flannery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/dancing_to_flannery.html","title":{"rendered":"Dancing to Flannery"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bill T. Jones has a new dance piece. The NYTimes reports:<\/a><\/p>\n

Starting on Tuesday, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Bill T. Jones\/Arnie Zane Dance Company will present the New York premiere of a 45-minute work provocatively titled “Reading, Mercy and the Artificial Nigger.” It is based on “The Artificial Nigger,” a complex and beguiling short story by Flannery O’Connor, which is read aloud during the performance. (Susan Sarandon and Mr. Jones will be the readers on opening night.)<\/p>\n

The story opens with its main characters, Mr. Head and his 10-year-old grandson, Nelson, who live together in rural Georgia, preparing for a trip to Atlanta. Mr. Head sees the trip as an opportunity to teach his grandson a lesson about the sinful ways of the city, in hopes that he will never want to return. Nelson views the trip as a chance to see the place where he believes he was born. As Nelson becomes more infatuated with the wonders of the city, Mr. Head grows more distressed, and eventually abandons his grandson, both physically and emotionally. On their way to the train for the trip home, they encounter a mysterious plaster figure, a black boy about Nelson’s size from which the story takes its title, and in a moment of revelation, they find the grace to restore the bond between them.<\/p>\n

Mr, Jones, 51, discussed the work with Fletcher Roberts, an Arts & Leisure editor, after a recent rehearsal at a Manhattan studio.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bill T. Jones has a new dance piece. The NYTimes reports: Starting on Tuesday, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Bill T. Jones\/Arnie Zane Dance Company will present the New York premiere of a 45-minute work provocatively titled “Reading, Mercy and the Artificial Nigger.” It is based on “The Artificial Nigger,” a complex and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nDancing to Flannery - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/dancing_to_flannery.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Dancing to Flannery - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Bill T. Jones has a new dance piece. The NYTimes reports: Starting on Tuesday, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Bill T. Jones\/Arnie Zane Dance Company will present the New York premiere of a 45-minute work provocatively titled “Reading, Mercy and the Artificial Nigger.” It is based on “The Artificial Nigger,” a complex and…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/dancing_to_flannery.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2004-01-31T23:58:21+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"awelborn\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Dancing to Flannery - Via Media","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/dancing_to_flannery.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Dancing to Flannery - Via Media","og_description":"Bill T. Jones has a new dance piece. The NYTimes reports: Starting on Tuesday, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Bill T. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8016"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8016\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}