It makes sense that if choreographer Bill T. Jones ever took an interest in puppetry, he would find puppets with attitude.
"A Quarreling Pair," Jones' brilliant, new dance-theater work, which received its premiere Friday at Montclair State University's
Alexander Kasser Theater, is based upon a stylized puppet script with an existentialist theme. Written by the late playwright Jane Bowles,
the scenario features sisters Harriet and Rhoda, marionettes whose dysfunctional relationship suggests a balsa wood version of Jane and
Blanche in "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?"

The agile and multi-threat members of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company take turns, along with winsome actress
Tracy Ann Johnson, playing the sisters who appear first behind a shadow-screen and then in vaudeville skits enriched with dancing.
One of the amazing things about Jones' take on Bowles' work, however, is that he lets Harriet and Rhoda flog each other with their
whining and berating, yet leaves us with a poignant sense of how deep their feelings run and how much their relationship might mean to them.
Enlisting a number of top-flight collaborators, including scenic designer Bjorn G. Amelan; composers and musicians Wynne Bennett,
Christopher Lancaster and George Lewis Jr.; costume designer Liz Prince; lighting designer Robert Wierzel; and videographer Janet Wong,
Jones treats the crazy sisters with compassion.

He approaches Bowles' tidy little puppet play as a compressed file from which vast amounts of information can be extracted.
Vaudeville, more than a simple marionette show, is an arch theatrical form that has the mask-like power to suggest transformation
-- and that's what Jones is after. Even puppets, Jones says, can change their destiny. He refuses to accept his characters' inability to
escape from their tiny rooms.

In "A Quarreling Pair," Jones creates a theatrical carnival of confusion in which Rhoda, the sister who says she wants to change the world,
is allowed to flee. The ribald comedy of ensuing numbers also permits Jones to satisfy an audience's thirst for simple entertainment.
The choreographer incorporates not only crass vaudeville stunts -- a "dog" act in which one dancer urinates on the other's leg;
and a stripper with a rubber chicken up her dress -- but also the canned applause of television. Transvestism (starting with the shadow-screen)
and other disguises point to the multiple dimensions of life, and of this show. After the unfortunate Rhoda escapes from her sister's nagging,
she tries but fails to make a career as a jazz singer. Then Rhoda crosses the border into Mexico, where a crazed female impersonator,
La Torita, hires her as a personal assistant. La Torita treats her badly -- very badly -- but Rhoda refuses to give up and go home.

Taking his cue from the Bob Dylan song "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," and combining it with videos of protest marches and of a
sky thick with smoke, Jones suggests that only by going out into the world to meet our destiny can we (possibly) avoid annihilation.
Hiding in your room at home won't help. Still, Jones pities the abandoned Harriet, who remains locked in her routine, reciting her lines
as a monologue and offering a glass of milk to the empty air. The music grows soulful, and, in a sequence nearly as slow as Japanese butoh,
the dancers cross in and out of Harriet's room, their folding lines exquisitely patterned.

Robert Johnson may be reached at rjohnson@starledger.com