Phoenix Fabrik, 2002 [Enlarge in New Window]

Daniel Alexander Jones: Phoenix Fabrik

Over the past two years, the process of creating the work Phoenix Fabrik has taken writer/performer Daniel Alexander Jones from his home in Springfield, Massachusetts, to Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Hamburg, Germany. What began as a simple solo theater work about--ironically--finding one's way home has evolved into a visually rich tapestry of music, language, and choreography. A collaboration with acclaimed vocalist Helga Davis, Phoenix Fabrik evokes silenced histories, personal transformation, and the healing power of music.

By turns impressionistic and plainspoken, Phoenix Fabrik is set in a dreamlike doll factory, where characters communicate through coded knocks and poetic snatches of text and song. As in each of Jones's performance works over the past 10 years, music is a critical element. Here it is full of shifts in emotion that are at once surprising and surprisingly organic. Both Jones and Davis are fluent in everything from opera to jazz, from turn-of-the-century spirituals to contemporary pop, and the resulting blend they've developed is both worldly and uniquely American.

Despite its expanded scale, the heart of Phoenix Fabrik has remained constant. "The core theme--the creation of one's own language--is still the engine of the piece," Jones notes. But in working together, he and Davis began finding additional layers of meaning. "It has become about the way that language either helps you or keeps you from yourself," he explains.

While working in Germany, Jones and Davis were fascinated by the differences in how America and Germany have struggled with their respective pasts. "I'm very interested in silenced history," Jones explains. "I saw this connection between Helga's and my fascination with American history and slavery, and my friends in Germany and their generation's dealing with the Holocaust." Still, Phoenix Fabrik remains a personal journey. "It's not a piece about the Holocaust or about slavery," Jones says, "but those things inform it."

An accomplished vocalist who has performed with Grisha Coleman's acclaimed ensemble Hot Mouth and has lectured on jazz at several universities, Jones says that music is the key that opens each new piece. "I listen to my characters the way I listen to songs," he explains. "I first started making performance pieces the same way I would try to arrange songs on an album." While early works like Blood Shock Boogie (1995) were resolutely abstract and often autobiographical, Jones's recent inclination is to incorporate both humor and naturalistic dialogue. "I think humor is hugely important," he says. "And even though I'm not interested in naturalism as a style, I think it can be a touchstone, a place where people can put their hand or let their eye rest, and that can lead them to somewhere more resonant."

In addition to developing his own work, Jones continues to direct other artists' projects, from a workshop of Carl Hancock Rux's Smoke, Lillies, and Jade at the Public Theater in New York, to Claudia Shear's comedy Dirty Blonde at Alaska's Perseverance Theater. Jones says these forays into other artists' worlds help him better understand his own vision. "I really think of myself as being part of a tribe of artists," Jones says. "In our own ways, all of us are establishing new vocabularies for honest human communication on stage."

With Phoenix Fabrik slated to open in New York in 2003, Jones is currently at work on Bel Canto, a play about, among other things, the effects of '60s counterculture on a single family, the image of the American flag, and the role of music in the life of a boy who is dislocated in a new city. Directed by Robbie McCauley, Bel Canto follows a clearer narrative than Jones's previous works while fully encompassing his idiosyncratic blend of elegy, humor, and music. "I'm fascinated by the ways form can shift to accommodate the nature of the content," says Jones. "I have to keep myself open and let it change."

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Performance > Performance Art / Theater / Spoken Word | African American Themes | Fantasy & Myth | Northeast | 2000