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History has rules. One rule dictates that a people whose identity has been forged by violence and deprivation will manifest violence and deprivation. Such rules must be broken.—Bill T. JonesWhen Bill T. Jones's longtime creative and life partner Arnie Zane was in the last months of his life, the pair began conceiving a new work for their dance company, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company (BTJ/AZ), that was inspired by Zane's love of Leonardo da Vinci's paintingThe Last Supperand a gift from company member Seán Curran of a pornographic deck of playing cards titled 52 Handsome Nudes. Zane generated the image of African American opera star Jessye Norman “on an ice floe, suspended above the stage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music” as a postmodern interpretation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's character Eliza Harris, the romantic heroine ofUncle Tom's Cabin. Zane passed away in March of 1988, and Jones continued on with their idea, eventually staging and touringLast Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Landin 1990. The first half of the work, comprising “The Cabin” and “Eliza on the Ice,” is a reimagining of Stowe's classic text that is part of one of the company's abiding projects, the choreographing of contemporary relationships to history. For Jones and many in his company,Uncle Tom's Cabinwas not simply a story from the past but was rather a persistent narrative that has shaped historical trajectories of racial prejudice within the United States and in current lived experiences of racialized embodiment. This essay examines how the company's multiracial cast performed “Eliza on the Ice” as an experiment in historical inquiry through imagining “counterfactuals” to Stowe's representation of the racially hybrid Eliza. I propose that the company's choreographic and conceptual strategy of counterfactual moving, through its emphasis on embodiment, critically addresses the impact of the historical past on present bodies.

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