Photos: Paul B. Goode A Rite NEW PROJECT! Premiering in January 2013 A dance-theater collaboration with Anne Bogart and SITI Company.

Story/Time Bill T. Jones returns to the stage in a critically acclaimed new work of storytelling and dance.

Play and Play: An Evening of Movement and Music “Take something and do something to it, and then do something 152 West 57th Street, 5th Floor else to it.” – Jasper Johns Carnegie Hall Tower New York, NY 10019 Phone 212-994-3500 Fax 212-994-3550 [email protected] Duet Programs www.imgartists.com Body Against Body and Between Us. www.youtube.com/imgartists Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and Dance Theater Workshop Reimagined | newyorklivearts.org/#/BTJAZDC 2013–2014 Season

Now in its 30th year, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company was born out of an 11- Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane year collaboration between Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane (1948–1988). During this time, they Dance Company redefined the duet form and foreshadowed issues of identity, form and social commentary Jean Davidson, Executive Director 219 W 19th Street that would change the face of American dance. The Company has performed worldwide in over New York, NY 10011 200 cities in 40 countries on every major continent and is recognized as one of the most t: 212.691.6500 innovative and powerful forces in the dance-theater world. Touring projects for the 2013-2014 f: 212.633.1974 season include major new work, repertory classics, minimal duets and Bill T. Jones’s return [email protected] to the stage. newyorklivearts.org/#/BTJAZDC

A Rite US Representation NEW PROJECT! Premiering in January 2013 IMG Artists Carnegie Hall Tower This work brings together two leading American directors and their companies. A Rite is an intriguing and 152 W 57th Street, 5th Floor powerful collaboration between artists Bill T. Jones and Anne Bogart and their respective companies – Bill T. New York, NY 10019 Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and SITI Company. Coinciding with the one-hundredth anniversary of the t: 212.994.3500 premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Jones and Bogart combine forces to explore the impact of this f: 212.994.3550 revolutionary piece of music, imagining the consequence of hearing the score played for the very first time. [email protected] www.imgartists.com Commissioned by Carolina Performing Arts at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. European Representation Gillian Newson Story/Time DanceArts UK, London Office “Modern yet wry, gorgeously danced and at times discordant...a dance-theater roller coaster with surprises t: +44 20 7622 8549 around every corner.” – San Francisco Chronicle f: +44 77 6816 6381 [email protected] Director and choreographer Bill T. Jones – whose major honors include a MacArthur “Genius” Award, the skype gilliannewson Kennedy Center Honors and two Tony Awards for Best Choreography – returns to the stage at the center of a new work for his renowned company. Inspired by legendary artist and composer John Cage’s Indeterminacy, a performance of ninety one-minute stories interrupted by a chance musical score, Jones creates a collage of dance, music, and seventy of his own short stories, arranged anew for each performance by chance procedure. Original music composed by Ted Coffey will accompanies the diverse company of dancers.

Co-commissioned by Peak Performances at Montclair State (NJ) and the Walker Art Center.

Play and Play: An Evening of Movement and Music “Rarely has one seen a dance company throw itself onto the stage with such kinetic exaltation.” – The New York Times

The Company’s classical music-focused program includes D-Man in the Waters (1989), Bill T. Jones’s joyful tour de force and a genuine modern dance classic, set to Mendelssohn’s Octet in E Flat Major Opus 20, this renowned work showcases the virtuosic company in a celebration of life and the resiliency of the human spirit. Other works include pieces to Mozart, Schubert and Ravel. Requires local string musicians.

Reconstruction support for D-Man in the Waters provided by the American Dance Festival.

Duet Programs Body Against Body and Between Us

“Bill T. Jones unadorned is a revelation.” – The Boston Globe

Body Against Body returns to Bill T. Jones’s roots in the avant-garde with a program that revives and reconsiders the challenging, groundbreaking works that launched Jones and the late Arnie Zane, his partner and collaborator of 17 years. Still some of the most significant examples of the postmodern aesthetic, these pieces redefined the duet form and changed the face of American dance. Between Us is a program of powerful duets that paint and intriguing portrait of the bond between two people, reflecting the humanity and effort implicit in the most complex of relationships – the partnership.

Body Against Body was commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston.

Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and Dance Theater Workshop Reimagined | newyorklivearts.org/#/BTJAZDC Photos: Paul B. Goode Duet Programs Body Against Body and Between Us

“The combination of brisk formality and a deeply sensual attack... was riveting decades ago and it’s riveting today.” – New York Magazine

152 West 57th Street, 5th Floor Carnegie Hall Tower New York, NY 10019 Phone 212-994-3500 Fax 212-994-3550 [email protected] www.imgartists.com www.youtube.com/imgartists Duet Programs

Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane “Bill T. Jones unadorned is a revelation.” The Boston Globe Dance Company Jean Davidson, Executive Director Body Against Body and Between Us are intimate and focused collections of duet works drawn 219 W 19th Street from the Company’s 30 year history. Body Against Body returns to Bill T. Jones’s roots in the New York, NY 10011 avant-garde with a program that revives and reconsiders the challenging, groundbreaking works t: 212.691.6500 that launched Jones and the late Arnie Zane, his partner and collaborator of 17 years. Still f: 212.633.1974 some of the most significant examples of the postmodern aesthetic, these pieces redefined the [email protected] duet form and changed the face of American dance. Both conceptually and physically rigorous, newyorklivearts.org/#/BTJAZDC the works take on new life through the diverse dancers of Jones’s company, providing a rare US Representation look at the origins of a widely acclaimed choreographer. Between Us is a program of powerful IMG Artists duets that paint an intriguing portrait of the bond between two people, reflecting the humanity Carnegie Hall Tower and effort implicit in the most complex of relationships – the partnership. 152 W 57th Street, 5th Floor New York, NY 10019 Programs include 2-3 works from the Company’s repertory: t: 212.994.3500 f: 212.994.3550 Blauvelt Mountain (A Fiction) (1980, reconstructed 2002) [email protected] One of the first duets that Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane created together, Blauvelt Mountain capitalizes on the www.imgartists.com disparities and specificities between distinct body types, often placing one person in a position of dependency. Eccentric and occasionally humorous tableaux, casual conversations, and word associations are paired with European Representation rigorous partnering sequences to suggest the mental and emotional engagement, heightened awareness, Gillian Newson and intimacy necessary for successful partnering. DanceArts UK, London Office t: +44 20 7622 8549 f: +44 77 6816 6381 Continuous Replay (1977, revised by Bill T. Jones 1991) [email protected] Continuous Replay is a work that traces Arnie Zane’s interests in photography and film. Originally choreographed skype gilliannewson by Zane in 1977 as a solo titled Hand Dance and later revised as a group work by Bill T. Jones in 1991, Continuous Replay is based on 45 precise gestures accumulated in space and time, cunningly complicated by discrete movement and an improvisational score. Contains nudity.

Duet x 2 (1982, reconstructed 2003) The virtuosity of Duet x 2 is rooted in conventional modern dance vocabulary and marked by demanding athletics, surprising shapes and changing relationships. The work underlines the power and emotion that is experienced when two male bodies walk, stand, support and crash through space at full throttle.

Monkey Run Road (1979, reconstructed 2011) The earliest of the Body Against Body duets, Monkey Run Road reveals the early dance-making concerns of Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane. Traces of the duo’s background in jiu-jitsu, social dancing, photography, and contact improvisation are readily seen in the piece, where repetitive, athletic phrases are punctuated by minimalist tasks and fragments of dialogue.

Valley Cottage: A Study (1980/1981, reconstructed 2011) A new reconstruction for 2011, Valley Cottage is a duet that has not been seen since its original performances in the early ‘80s. The reconstruction draws upon the personalities and relationships of the company’s dancers in place of the original spoken text by Jones and Zane.

Duet (1995/2002) For two dancers in perfect unison, this piece’s coolly sophisticated movement reflects Jones’s work with Trisha Brown. The precise and challenging choreography is accompanied by John Oswald’s frenetic 1975 “plunderphonic” track Power, combining rock guitars with the exhortations of an evangelist preacher. The final section is set to Daniel Bernard Roumain’s imagined conversation between titans of the mid-twentieth century avant-garde and an aged African-American mother of twelve.

Body Against Body was commissioned by The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston.

Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and Dance Theater Workshop Reimagined | newyorklivearts.org/#/BTJAZDC Photos: Paul B. Goode Play and Play: An Evening of Movement and Music

“No other dancer-choreographer working today allows past, present, and future to mingle so freely in his body.” – Vanity Fair

“Take something and do something to it, and then do something else to it.” – Jasper Johns 152 West 57th Street, 5th Floor Carnegie Hall Tower New York, NY 10019 Phone 212-994-3500 Fax 212-994-3550 [email protected] www.imgartists.com www.youtube.com/imgartists Play and Play: An Evening of Movement and Music Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company Jean Davidson, Executive Director “Rarely has one seen a dance company throw itself onto the stage with such 219 W 19th Street kinetic exaltation.” – The New York Times New York, NY 10011 t: 212.691.6500 Performed with live musicians,* Play and Play: An evening of movement and music applies f: 212.633.1974 [email protected] Jones’s inventive choreography to some of the most important Western musical works of our newyorklivearts.org/#/BTJAZDC time. Featuring compositions by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Ravel or Schubert this program highlights the joy of musicians and dancers working together. US Representation IMG Artists Programs include 2-3 works from the Company’s repertory: Carnegie Hall Tower 152 W 57th Street, 5th Floor D-Man in the Waters (1989, revised 1998) New York, NY 10019 t: 212.994.3500 “In a dream you saw a way to survive and you were full of joy.”- Jenny Holzer f: 212.994.3550 [email protected] Bill T Jones’s joyful tour-de-force, D-Man in the Waters, is a true classic of modern dance and a New York Dance www.imgartists.com and Performance (“Bessie”) Award-winning work. It is a celebration of life and the resiliency of the human spirit that guides audiences through loss, hope and triumph. Set to Mendelssohn’s Octet for Strings in E-flat Major, Op. European Representation 20 the work is one of the finest examples of the post-modern aesthetic and was featured in PBS’s landmark film Gillian Newson Dancing in the Light – Six Dances by African-American Choreographers. DanceArts UK, London Office Spent Days Out Yonder (2000) t: +44 20 7622 8549 f: +44 77 6816 6381 Spent Days Out Yonder is a pure musical exploration, rare in the Bill T. Jones canon, set to the second movement [email protected] of Mozart’s String Quartet No. 23 in F Major. The movement is firmly rooted in Mr. Jones’s elegant, weighted skype gilliannewson movement vocabulary, challenging dancers to move with ease, efficiency and physical honesty through the sublime score.

Continuous Replay (1977, revised 1991) Continuous Replay reflects Arnie Zane’s interests in photography and film. Originally choreographed by Zane in 1977 as a solo titled Hand Dance and later revised as a group work by Bill T. Jones in 1991, Continuous Replay is based on 45 precise gestures accumulated in space and time, cunningly complicated by discrete movement events. A newly commissioned score for string octet by Jerome Begin combines motifs from Beethoven’s first and last string quartets with recorded sounds to create a surprising soundscape. Contains nudity.

Ravel: Landscape or Portrait? (2012) This new work responds to Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet in F Major (1903), reflecting the wistful and melancholic sentiment of the score as well as its precision and restraint. Similar to the music’s complicated internal logic, one of two choreographic variations for the third movement (either landscape or portrait) is selected by chance procedure before each performance.

Story (2013) Story and Ravel: Landscape or Portrait are Jones’s first new repertory works in over a decade. In this piece, Franz Schubert’s String Quartet No. 14 in D Minor (Death and the Maiden) is the basis for an energetic new work that draws from the company’s latest choreographic methods developed for 2012’s Story/Time.

Reconstruction support for D-Man in the Waters provided by the American Dance Festival. * Requires local string musicians at each engagement

Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and Dance Theater Workshop Reimagined | newyorklivearts.org/#/BTJAZDC Photos: Anne Bogart by Craig Schwartz and Bill T. Jones by Stephanie Berger

A Rite

NEW PROJECT! Premiering in January 2013

Award winning directors Bill T. Jones and Anne Bogart collaborate to create a major new dance-theater work coinciding with the 100th Anniversary of the premiere 152 West 57th Street, 5th Floor Carnegie Hall Tower of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. New York, NY 10019 Phone 212-994-3500 Fax 212-994-3550 [email protected] www.imgartists.com www.youtube.com/imgartists A Rite (2013)

Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane “…one of the most prominent and provocative American choreographers of Dance Company Jean Davidson, Executive Director his generation…” – The N ew York Times (on Bill T. Jones) 219 W 19th Street New York, NY 10011 t: 212.691.6500 “…controversial and visionary, (and) obviously not afraid of challenges.” f: 212.633.1974 – The N ew York Times (on Anne Bogart) [email protected] newyorklivearts.org /#/BTJAZDC For its thirtieth anniversary, the Company will create a major new dance-theater work bringing together two US Representation leading American directors and their companies. A Rite is an intriguing and powerful collaboration between IMG Artists artists Bill T. Jones and Anne Bogart and their respective companies – Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company Carnegie Hall Tower and SITI Company. Coinciding with the one-hundredth anniversary of the premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite 152 W 57th Street, 5th Floor of Spring, Jones and Bogart combine forces to explore the impact of this revolutionary piece of music, imagining New York, NY 10019 the consequence of hearing the score played for the very first time. t: 212.994.3500 f: 212.994.3550 Artists’ statement: [email protected] Our intention is to create a meditation upon the phenomenon of the encounter with Igor Stravinsky’s music and www.imgartists.com with the history that the piece carries upon its back. We are taking the work apart and putting it back together again in a way that we both hope will speak to audiences everywhere. The music is prime and the social- European Representation historical context is a point of departure as is the community created by the joining of our two companies. We Gillian Newson both believe that the work allows us the opportunity to reflect upon the human condition: sacrifice; creative DanceArts UK, London Office and spiritual rebirth; the individual against or with the community. Much of the spoken text will be by Jonah t: +44 20 7622 8549 Lehrer from his chapter on Stravinsky in his bestselling book Proust Was a Neuroscientist. The result will not f: +44 77 6816 6381 be a re-construction of the performance and subsequent riot at the infamous Parisian premiere, but rather a [email protected] deconstruction of the music and its impact upon the development of the human mind. skype gilliannewson – Anne Bogart & Bill T. Jones

World Premiere in January 2013 at Carolina Performing Arts, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Commissioned by Carolina Performing Arts, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and Dance Theater Workshop Reimagined | newyorklivearts.org/#/BTJAZDC Photos: Paul B. Goode (left), Gene Pittman (right) Story/Time (2012)

“Modern yet wry, gorgeously danced and at times discordant...a dance-theater roller coaster with surprises around every corner.” – San Francisco Chronicle

Director and choreographer Bill T. Jones returns to the stage in a critically acclaimed new work of 152 West 57th Street, 5th Floor Carnegie Hall Tower storytelling and dance. New York, NY 10019 Phone 212-994-3500 Fax 212-994-3550 [email protected] www.imgartists.com www.youtube.com/imgartists Story/Time (2012) Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company “These memories…are poignant, hilarious and sometimes terrifying.” Jean Davidson, Executive Director 219 W 19th Street –The Star-Ledger New York, NY 10011 t: 212.691.6500 f: 212.633.1974 “All his endeavors…go back to the questions about love, history and [email protected] identity.” – The New York Times newyorklivearts.org/#/BTJAZDC

Director and choreographer Bill T. Jones – whose major honors include a MacArthur “Genius” Award, the US Representation Kennedy Center Honors and two Tony Awards for Best Choreography – returns to the stage at the center of IMG Artists an acclaimed new work for his renowned company. Inspired by legendary artist and composer John Cage’s Carnegie Hall Tower Indeterminacy, a performance of ninety one-minute stories interrupted by a chance musical score, Jones creates 152 W 57th Street, 5th Floor a collage of dance, music, and seventy of his own short stories, arranged anew for each performance by chance New York, NY 10019 procedure. t: 212.994.3500 f: 212.994.3550 In Story/Time, Jones fuses the age-old art of storytelling with a vibrant landscape of contemporary movement [email protected] and music. Similar to a busy streetscape or a crowded room, the experience challenges audience members to www.imgartists.com find meaning and connection in the sweep of randomized, disparate elements. Jones’ short stories are drawn from his own life and tales handed down through the generations of his family. In layering a traditional form European Representation against the avant-garde compositional concerns of the mid-century modernists, the tension between high and Gillian Newson low art is called in to question. DanceArts UK, London Office t: +44 20 7622 8549 In his first project with the Company, composer, musician, and intermedia artist Ted Coffey, Ph.D. composes and f: +44 77 6816 6381 performs a new acoustic and electronic score that draws upon chance procedure and interactive technologies. [email protected] In Open Space, Newton Armstrong describes Coffey’s music as “subtle, weird and devoid of heroics. It’s the kind skype gilliannewson of music that resonates for days after you’ve heard it, and its spaces and gestures continue to form into new and extraordinary geometries.”

Long-time Company collaborators Robert Wierzel (lighting design), Bjorn Amelan (décor), and Liz Prince (costume design) designed the immersive, minimalist stage environment.

Co-commissioned by Peak Performances @ Montclair State (NJ) and the Walker Art Center.

Developed in residence at Arizona State University Gammage Auditorium, Bard College, Alexander Kasser Theater at Montclair State University, University of Virginia, and the Walker Art Center.

Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and Dance Theater Workshop Reimagined | newyorklivearts.org/#/BTJAZDC For Immediate Release Contact: Danielle Bias [email protected] (212) 691-6500 x212

Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company Celebrates 30th Anniversary

2012-2013 Season Highlights include:

World Premiere of A Meditation on The Rite of Spring (working title) in collaboration with Anne Bogart and SITI Company at Carolina Performing Arts

Two-week season at The Joyce Theater featuring D-Man in the Waters and other repertory with the Orion String Quartet

Tour to 24 cities in the United States and Europe

New York, NY, May 30, 2012 – Over the past 30 years, multi-talented artist, choreographer, dancer, theater director and writer Bill T. Jones and his celebrated company of dancers have left an indelible mark on the performing arts landscape and are today one of the most influential and recognizable forces in the dance-theater world. In the 2012-2013 season, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company celebrates its 30th Anniversary with a tour to 24 cities in the United States and Europe; a highly anticipated World Premiere co-production with Anne Bogart and SITI Company; and a New York City season at The Joyce Theater with the Orion String Quartet featuring D-Man in the Waters, a classic work not seen in New York since 2002.

“This season, as the company celebrates 30 years of creative discourse, I am grateful to the artists and audiences who have participated in the vision that Arnie Zane and I created together in 1982,” said Bill T. Jones. “Since that time, the Company has in some ways become a microcosm of the world that I would like to live in: a diverse group of talented personalities working together. It is fitting that during this milestone year we find ourselves settled in a new artistic home at New York Live Arts, with ambitious new work in development and on tour. We are wild about the future.”

In September, the Company will embark on a two-month European tour to Germany, Italy, France and The Netherlands. A U.S. tour will begin in November with stops in Memphis, TN; Winston-Salem, NC; St. Petersburg, FL; Chattanooga, TN; St. Louis, MO; Chapel Hill, NC; College Park, MD; Philadelphia, PA; Purchase, NY; Beaver Creek, CO; New York, NY; Tempe, AZ; and Tulsa, OK. Touring programs include Story/Time, which premiered in 2012 and is inspired by John Cage’s Indeterminacy; the Play and Play featuring new and reconstructed works set to classical music, including D-Man in the Waters; Body Against Body, a collection of early works that examine Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane’s roots in the avant-garde; and the World Premiere of A Meditation on The Rite of Spring (working title), a major new work under development in collaboration with Anne Bogart and SITI Company.

1 Commissioned by Carolina Performing Arts at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as part of “The Rite of Spring at One Hundred” nine-month centennial festival, Bill T. Jones and Anne Bogart will join forces to create a new dance-theater work reflecting on the significance and themes of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. In A Meditation on The Rite of Spring (working title), the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and SITI Company will explore the impact of Stravinsky’s revolutionary piece of music and imagine the consequence of hearing it played for the very first time. After the World Premiere performance at Carolina Performing Arts on January 25-26, the work will tour to the University of Maryland in College Park, MD (February 8-9) and SUNY Purchase in Purchase, NY (March 2). Later in March, the Company will have its New York City season (March 26-31 & April 2-7) at The Joyce Theater with two repertory programs featuring music-inspired works accompanied live by the Orion String Quartet, including two NY premieres and the return of the rarely seen D-Man in the Waters. The Company last appeared at The Joyce Theater in 2009 with Serenade/The Proposition.

A LOOK BACK: 30 YEARS OF AN ARTISTIC LIFE

30 years ago, after meeting at the State University of New York at Binghamton (SUNY), Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane (1948 – 1988) co-founded the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and emerged onto the international scene in 1983 with the world premiere of Intuitive Momentum at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s inaugural Next Wave Festival. Together, Jones and Zane redefined the duet form and foreshadowed issues of identity, form and social commentary that would change the face of American dance.

Jones, who recently turned 60, is one of the most important American artists working today. He is recognized as a striking performer, a prolific creator of post-modern contemporary dance and Broadway theater, and a provocative choreographer who fearlessly tackles political and social concerns in his work.

Over the past three decades, Jones has created more than 140 works for the Company, earning significant commissions, awards and recognition along the way. His major honors include a 1994 MacArthur “Genius” Award and the 2010 Kennedy Center Honors. In 2009 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and was named “An Irreplaceable Dance Treasure” by the Dance Heritage Coalition in 2000. He and the Company have received major commissions from Lincoln Center Festival, Peak Performances at Montclair State University (NJ), Ravinia Festival, Walker Art Center and many other leading institutions. He has also received commissions to create works for companies including Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Boston Ballet, Lyon Opera Ballet, Berlin Opera Ballet, and others.

Some of Jones’s most courageous and controversial productions have addressed issues of race, religion, mortality and illness, freedom and slavery – often drawing ire and awe at the same time: Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land (1990, Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music); Still/Here (1994, Biennale de la Danse in Lyon, France); We Set Out Early… Visibility Was Poor (1996, Hancher Auditorium, Iowa City, IA); You Walk? (2000, European Capital of Culture 2000, Bolgna, Italy); Blind Date (2006, Peak Performances at Montclair State University); Chapel/Chapter (2006, Harlem Stage Gatehouse); and Fondly Do We Hope… Fervently Do We Pray (2009, Ravinia Festival, Highland Park, IL).

2

Jones has long been revered for his highly collaborative, interdisciplinary process, having worked over the years with such notable artists as Keith Haring, Cassandra Wilson, Orion String Quartet, the Chamber Society of Lincoln Center, Fred Hersch, Jenny Holzer, Robert Longo, Julius Hemphill, Toni Morrison, Max Roach, Jessye Norman, and Daniel Bernard Roumain, among others. His current collaboration with director Anne Bogart and SITI Company on A Meditation on The Rite of Spring (working title) for January 2013 is a continuation of this shared creative practice.

NEW HORIZONS

In addition to his intriguing collaborations and work for his company, Jones has won international renown for his work on Broadway. He earned two Tony Awards for Best Choreography – one in 2010 for the critically acclaimed FELA!, the musical he co-conceived, co-wrote, directed and choreographed, receiving 11 Tony Award nominations overall, and another in 2007 for Spring Awakening. He won an Obie Award for Spring Awakening’s 2006 off-Broadway run and a 2006 Lucille Lortel Award for his choreography of the off-Broadway production of The Seven.

In 2011, Jones opened a new chapter in his career and the Company’s history with the merger of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and the iconic Dance Theater Workshop to form New York Live Arts, an organization that supports the nation’s dance and movement-based artists through new approaches to producing, presenting and educating and which serves as the home of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. Jones was named Executive Artistic Director of the organization, where he works closely with Artistic Director Carla Peterson and Chief Executive Officer and Executive Director Jean Davidson to expand the cultural footprint of movement-based artists and performance. Jones also continues in his role as Artistic Director of his company, working with Associate Artistic Director Janet Wong to create new work, reconsider historically significant pieces, and continue to contribute to “the world of ideas.”

EDUCATIONAL INITIATIVES

In its 30th Anniversary season, the Company will continue to expand its dynamic education program, led by Leah Cox. The 2012-2013 academic year marks the Company’s fourth year in partnership with the Bard College Dance Program, where Company teaching artists and Live Arts guest artists teach an innovative curriculum designed to cultivate the next generation of dancemakers and creative thinkers. During the next academic year, Bard students will learn Cunningham technique from former Cunningham dancers Melissa Toogood and Daniel Squire, as well as other approaches to movement from teacher/dancer/choreographer Jesse Zaritt and former Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company dancers Stuart Singer and Asli Bulbul. Additionally, students at university and college dance programs throughout the U.S. will reconstruct significant Company works for performance. The Company also conducts intensive workshops for professional and pre- professional dancers and produces a broad range of discussion events at home and on the road.

Upcoming reconstruction projects include: Reading, Mercy and the Artificial Nigger and Mercy 10x8 on a Circle at California State University-Long Beach; D-Man in the Waters (Part I) and The Gift/No God Logic at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities; D-Man in the Waters (Part I) at the Boston Conservatory; D-Man in the Waters (Part I) at University of Wisconsin-Madison; Spent 3 Days Out Yonder at Loyola Marymount University; D-Man in the Waters (Part I) at University of Michigan; D-Man in the Waters at University of North Carolina School of the Arts; and a performance tour of D-Man in the Waters (Part I) in Taiwan by students of Taipei National University of the Arts.

2012-2013 TOUR PROGRAMS

A Meditation on The Rite of Spring (2013) (working title) represents an intriguing and powerful collaboration between two leading American directors and their companies. Coinciding with the 100th anniversary of the premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and SITI Company combine forces to explore the impact of this revolutionary piece of music, imagining the consequence of hearing the score played for the very first time. Commissioned by Carolina Performing Arts.

Story/Time (2012) is inspired by legendary artist and composer John Cage’s Indeterminacy (1958), a work in which Cage sat alone on stage reading an unbroken stream of one-minute stories to a small audience. In Story/Time, Bill T. Jones reads his own one-minute stories amidst a spellbinding landscape of dance and original music composed and mixed live by collaborator Ted Coffey. Mentored by Cage's modernist approach and governed by chance procedures, this “wondrously original” (Dance Magazine) and “radically engaging” (The Minneapolis Star-Tribune) work is an ever-changing score that yields a unique performance each night. The San Francisco Chronicle called it “…a dance theater rollercoaster with surprises around every corner.” Co- commissioned by Peak Performances at Montclair State University (NJ) and the Walker Art Center.

Play and Play features a collection of works set to chamber music, including D-Man in the Waters, Spent Days Out Yonder, and Continuous Replay, performed with a new musical score. All performances of the program in New York and on tour will be accompanied by live music.

Set to Mendelssohn’s Octet in E-flat Major for Strings, Op. 20, D-Man in the Waters (1989, revised 1998) is Jones’s joyful tour de force and was recently reconstructed in full for the first time since 2002. The New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award-winning classic is a celebration of life and the resiliency of the human spirit that embodies loss, hope and triumph. The New York Times stated, “Rarely has one seen a dance company throw itself onto the stage with such kinetic exaltation.”

Spent Days Out Yonder (2001) is a pure musical exploration, rare in the Bill T. Jones canon, a meditation on the second movement of Mozart’s String Quartet No. 23 in F Major. The choreography is firmly rooted in Jones’s elegant, weighted movement vocabulary, paired with a sublime score performed live by a local string octet.

Continuous Replay (1977, 1991) is a work that traces Arnie Zane’s interests in photography and film. Originally choreographed by Zane in 1977 as a solo titled Hand Dance and later revised as a group work by Bill T. Jones in 1991, Continuous Replay is based on 45 precise gestures accumulated in space and time. A new score by Jerome Begin incorporates material from Ludwig Van Beethoven's String Quartet Op. 18 No. 1 and String Quartet Op. 135.

4 New works for the program to be premiered during the 2012-2013 season will be Ravel: Landscape or Portrait? set to Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet in F Major, and Story set to Franz Schubert’s String Quartet No. 14 in D Minor (Death and the Maiden).

Body Against Body (2011) returns to Bill T. Jones’s roots in the avant-garde with a program that revives and reconsiders the challenging, groundbreaking works that launched Jones and the late Arnie Zane, his partner and collaborator of 17 years. Still some of the most significant examples of the postmodern aesthetic, these pieces redefined the duet form and changed the face of American dance. Both conceptually and physically rigorous, the works take on new life through the diverse dancers of Jones’s company, providing a rare look at the origins of an iconoclastic artistic sensibility. Commissioned by the ICA/Boston.

* 2012-2013 TOUR & 30th ANNIVERSARY SEASON SCHEDULE ATTACHED *

About Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company Bill T. Jones, a multi-talented artist, choreographer, dancer, theater director and writer, has received major honors ranging from a 1994 MacArthur “Genius” Award to Kennedy Center Honors in 2010. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2009 and named “An Irreplaceable Dance Treasure” by the Dance Heritage Coalition in 2000. His ventures into Broadway theater resulted in a 2010 Tony Award for Best Choreography in the critically acclaimed FELA!, the musical co-conceived, co-written, directed and choreographed by Mr. Jones. He also earned a 2007 Tony Award for Best Choreography in Spring Awakening, as well as an Obie Award for the show’s 2006 off-Broadway run. His choreography for the off-Broadway production of The Seven earned him a 2006 Lucille Lortel Award. In 2011, Mr. Jones was named Executive Artistic Director of New York Lives Arts.

Now in its 30th year, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company was born out of an 11-year collaboration between Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane (1948–1988). During this time, they redefined the duet form and foreshadowed issues of identity, form and social commentary that would change the face of American dance. Today, the nine member Company has performed worldwide in over 200 cities in 40 countries on every major continent and is recognized as one of the most innovative and powerful forces in the dance-theater world. In 2011, the Company merged with Dance Theater Workshop to form New York Live Arts.

About New York Live Arts New York Live Arts strives to create a robust framework in support of the nation’s dance and movement-based artists through new approaches to producing, presenting and educating. In addition to our deep commitment to individual artists at all stages of their careers, we strive to create rich, meaningful experiences for our audiences by engaging them in ways that are intimate and thought-provoking. With our audience, we seek to become a place for dance that is vital to the fabric of social and cultural life in New York, the United States and beyond.

Formed in February 2011 by a merger of Dance Theater Workshop and the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, New York Live Arts is a re-imagining of the legacies of these two extraordinary organizations. New York Live Arts is located at 219 West 19th Street in New York City and is led by 5 Bill T. Jones as Executive Artistic Director, Carla Peterson as Artistic Director, and Jean Davidson as Executive Director and CEO. www.newyorklivearts.org

Funding Support

The creation of new work by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company is made possible with generous support from the company’s Partners in Creation: Joe Azrack & Abigail Congdon, Anne Delaney, Eleanor Friedman, Sandra Eskin, Ruth & Stephen Hendel, Ellen Poss, and Jane Bovingdon Semel & Terry Semel.

Major support for New York Live Arts is provided by: Bloomberg Philanthropies, Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, Con Edison, Joseph and Joan Cullman Foundation for the Arts, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Ford Foundation, Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, Japan Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Lambent Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Mertz Gilmore Foundation, MetLife Foundation, , New York Community Trust, Shubert Foundation, Jerome Robbins Foundation, Scherman Foundation and the Trust for Mutual Understanding. New York Live Arts is supported by public funds administered by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

PRESS KITS AND DIGITAL IMAGES AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST

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30th Anniversary Tour Schedule – 2012-2013 Season

July 25-29, 2012 October 18-20, 2012 January 25 & 26, 2013 Becket, MA Creteil, France Chapel Hill, NC Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival Ted Maison des Arts Creteil Carolina Performing Arts Shawn Theater Play and Play Memorial Hall Story/Time www.maccreteil.com A Rite World Premiere! http://jacobspillow.org/ www.carolinaperformingarts.org October 23, 2012 July 31, 2012 Maubeuge, France February 8 & 9, 2013 Vienna, VA La Luna College Park, MD Wolf Trap Filene Center Play and Play Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center Story/Time www.lemanege.com University of Maryland www.wolftrap.org A Rite October 25, 2012 http://claricesmithcenter.umd.edu/ September 27 & 28, 2012 Amsterdam, The Netherlands Bonn, Germany Carré Theater February 21-23, 2013 Theater Bonn Story/Time Philadelphia, PA Play and Play www.theatercarre.nl The Painted Bride Arts Center www.theater-bonn.de Body Against Body October 27 & 28, 2012 www.paintedbride.org/ September 30, 2012 Amsterdam, The Netherlands Neuss, Germany Carré Theater March 2, 2013 Stadthalle Neuss Play and Play Purchase, NY Play and Play www.theatercarre.nl The Performing Arts Center SUNY www.neuss.de Purchase November 4, 2012 A Rite October 4-6, 2012 Memphis, TN www.artscenter.org/ Naples, Italy The Buckman Performing Arts Center Teatrino di Corte Between Us March 15, 2013 Play and Play www.stmarysschool.org/thebuckman/ Beaver Creek, CO www.teatrosancarlo.it Company residency Nov. 5-6, 2012 Vilar Center for the Arts Play and Play October 9, 2012 November 8-11, 2012 www.vilarpac.org Ferrara, Italy Winston-Salem, NC Teatro Comunale di Ferrara Salem College March 26-31 & April 2-7, 2013 Body Against Body Company workshop, showing (11/10) New York, NY www.teatrocomunaleferrara.it/ and Bill T. Jones lecture (11/11) The Joyce Theatre www.salem.edu Play and Play October 12 & 13, 2012 www.joyce.org Rome, Italy November 13, 2012 RomaEuropa Festival Chattanooga, TN April 20, 2013 Auditorium Conciliazione University of Tennessee UTC Tempe, AZ Play and Play Fine Arts Center ASU Gammage http://romaeuropa.net/ Between Us Play and Play www.utc.edu/FineArtsCenter/ www.asugammage.org October 14, 2012 Company residency April 19-24, 2013 Rome, Italy November 16 & 17, 2012 RomaEuropa Festival Teatro Eliseo St. Louis, MO April 27 & 28, 2013 Story/Time Edison Theater, Tulsa, OK http://romaeuropa.net/ Washington University Helmerich Theater Presented by Between Us Choregus Productions http://edison.wustl.edu/ Play and Play www.choregus.org

Performance dates and programs subject to change Visit www.newyorklivearts.org for updates

2012-13 Educational Projects

Residencies

Bard College Montclair State University Annandale-on-Hudson, NY Montclair, NJ Fall 2012-Spring 2013 Fall 2012/Spring 2013 Fourth year of an ongoing partnership: 7 dance courses taught by Reconstruction and student performances of Continuous Replay. Live Arts & Company teaching artists each academic year; campus- Reconstruction December 2012 wide events; Company residency Spring 2013. Performances Spring 2013 http://inside.bard.edu/dance/ http://www.montclair.edu/arts/theatre-and-dance/

Arizona State University University of Michigan Tempe, AZ Ann Arbor, MI Fall 2012-Spring 2013 Winter 2013 Bill T. Jones campus residency Sep. 24-27; teaching artist residency Reconstruction and student performances of D-Man in the Waters Nov. 5-9; full company residency Apr. 19-24. (Part I). http://www.asugammage.com/ Reconstruction January 2013 Performances February 7-10, 2013 http://www.music.umich.edu/departments/dance/index.php Reconstructions University of North Carolina School of the Arts California State University-Long Beach Winston-Salem, NC Long Beach, CA Spring 2013 Summer/Fall 2012 Reconstruction and student performances of D-Man in the Waters. Reconstruction and student performances of Reading, Mercy and the Reconstruction January 2013 Artificial Nigger and Mercy 10x8 on a Circle. Performances February 21-24, 2013 Performances November 16-17, 2012 http://www.uncsa.edu/dance/ http://www.csulb.edu/depts/dance/ Taipei National University of the Arts University of Minnesota-Twin Cities Taipei, Taiwan Minneapolis, MN Spring 2013 Fall 2012 Performance tour of D-Man in the Waters (Part I), Reconstructed and Reconstruction and student performances of D-Man in the Waters performed in Spring 2012. (Part I) and The Gift/No God Logic. Performance dates TBC Reconstruction September-October, 2012 Performances December 6-9, 2012 https://theatre.umn.edu/dance/ Workshops

Boston Conservatory University of Memphis Boston, MA Memphis, TN Fall 2012/Spring 2013 November 2-3, 2012 Reconstruction and student performances of D-Man in the Waters Technique and composition workshop with Company members. (Part I). http://www.memphis.edu Reconstruction September-October 2012 Performances November 1-4, 2012; April 18-20, 2013 Salem College http://www.bostonconservatory.edu/dance Winston-Salem, NC November 8-10, 2012 University of Wisconsin-Madison Workshop with Company members, informal performance, and Bill T. Madison, WI Jones lecture. Fall 2012/Spring 2013 http://www.salem.edu/ Reconstruction and student performances of D-Man in the Waters (Part I). Reconstruction October-November 2012 VISIT www.newyorklivearts.org FOR UPDATES Performances February 14-16, 2013 Dates and programs subject to change. www.dance.wisc.edu

Loyola Marymount University Los Angeles, CA Fall 2012/Spring 2013 Reconstruction and student performances of Spent Days Out Yonder. Reconstruction Fall semester 2012 Performances December 5-8, 2012 http://cfa.lmu.edu/programs/dance.htm

Company History

Now in its 30th year, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company was born out of an 11-year collaboration between Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane (1948–1988). During this time, they redefined the duet form and foreshadowed issues of identity, form and social commentary that would change the face of American dance. The Company emerged onto the international scene in 1983 with the world premiere of Intuitive Momentum, which featured legendary drummer Max Roach, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Since then, the 10-member Company has performed worldwide in over 200 cities in 30 countries on every major continent. Today, the Company is recognized as one of the most innovative and powerful forces in the modern dance world.

The repertory of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company is widely varied in its subject matter, visual imagery and stylistic approach to movement, voice and stagecraft and includes music-driven works as well as works using a variety of texts. The Company has been acknowledged for its intensely collaborative method of creation that has included artists as diverse as Keith Haring, Cassandra Wilson, The Orion String Quartet, the Chamber Society of Lincoln Center, Fred Hersch, Jenny Holzer, Robert Longo, Julius Hemphill and Daniel Bernard Roumain, among others. The collaborations of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company with visual artists were the subject of Art Performs Life (1998), a groundbreaking exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN.

Some of its most celebrated creations are evening length works including Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land (1990, Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music); Still/Here (1994, Biennale de la Danse in Lyon, France); We Set Out Early… Visibility Was Poor (1996, Hancher Auditorium,Iowa City, IA); You Walk? (2000, European Capital of Culture 2000,Bolgna, Italy); Blind Date (2006, Peak Performances at Montclair State University); Chapel/Chapter (2006, Harlem Stage Gatehouse); and Fondly Do We Hope… Fervently Do We Pray (2009, Ravinia Festival, Highland Park, IL). The ongoing, site-specific, Another Evening was last performed in its seventh incarnation as Another Evening: Venice/Arsenale (2010, La Biennale di Venezia).

The Company has also produced two evenings centered on Bill T. Jones’s solo performance: The Breathing Show (1999, Hancher Auditorium, Iowa City, IA) and As I Was Saying… (2005, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN).

The Company has been featured in many publications, and one of the most in-depth examinations of Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane’s collaborations can be found in Body Against Body: The Dance and Other Collaborations of Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane (1989 - Station Hill Press) edited by Elizabeth Zimmer.

The Company has received numerous awards, including New York Dance and Performance Awards ("Bessie") for Chapel/Chapter at Harlem Stage (2006), The Table Project (2001), D-Man in the Waters (1989 and 2001), musical scoring and costume design for Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land (1990) and for the groundbreaking Joyce Theater season (1986). The Company was nominated for the 1999 Laurence Olivier Award for “Outstanding Achievement in Dance and Best New Dance Production” for We Set Out Early… Visibility was Poor.

The Company celebrated its landmark 20th anniversary at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with 37 guest artists including Susan Sarandon, Cassandra Wilson and Vernon Reid. The Phantom Project: The 20th Season presented a diverse repertoire of over 15 revivals and new works.

During the Company’s 25th anniversary season in 2007, Ravinia Festival in Highland Park, IL offered the Company its most significant commission to date: to create a work to honor the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth. The Company created three new productions in response: 100 Migrations (2008), a site-specific community performance project; Serenade/The Proposition (2008), examining the nature of history; and Fondly Do We Hope… Fervently Do We Pray (2009), the making of which is the subject of a feature-length documentary by Kartemquin Films entitled A Good Man, which was broadcast on PBS American Masters in 2011.

The Company has distinguished itself through extensive community outreach and educational programs, including partnerships with Bard College, where company members teach an innovative curriculum rooted in the Company’s creative model and highly collaborative methods; and with Lincoln Center Institute, which uses Company works in its educator-training and in-school repertory programs. University and college dance programs throughout the U.S. work with the Company to reconstruct significant works for their students. The Company conducts intensive workshops for 1 professional and pre-professional dancers and produces a broad range of discussion events at home and on the road, all born from the strong desire to “participate in the world of ideas.”

In 2010, the Company announced a groundbreaking merger with Dance Theater Workshop that The New York Times said could “alter the contemporary dance landscape in New York.” The organization, called New York Live Arts, strives to create a robust framework in support of the nation’s dance and movement-based artists through new approaches to producing, presenting and educating. For more information: www.newyorklivearts.org

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Bill T. Jones Biography

Bill T. Jones (Artistic Director/Co-Founder/Choreographer), a multi-talented artist, choreographer, dancer, theater director and writer, has received major honors ranging from a 1994 MacArthur “Genius” Award to Kennedy Center Honors in 2010. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2009 and named “An Irreplaceable Dance Treasure” by the Dance Heritage Coalition in 2000. His ventures into Broadway theater resulted in a 2010 Tony Award for Best Choreography in the critically acclaimed FELA!, the new musical co- conceived, co-written, directed and choreographed by Mr. Jones. He also earned a 2007 Tony Award for Best Choreography in Spring Awakening as well as an Obie Award for the show’s 2006 off-Broadway run. His choreography for the off-Broadway production of The Seven earned him a 2006 Lucille Lortel Award. Mr. Jones began his dance training at the State University of New York at Binghamton (SUNY), where he studied classical ballet and modern dance. After living in Amsterdam, Mr. Jones returned to SUNY, where he became co- founder of the American Dance Asylum in 1973. In 1982 he formed the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company (then called Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane & Company) with his late partner, Arnie Zane. In 2011, Mr. Jones was named Executive Artistic Director of New York Lives Arts, an organization that strives to create a robust framework in support of the nation’s dance and movement-based artists through new approaches to producing, presenting and educating. For more information visit www.newyorklivearts.org.

In addition to creating more than 140 works for his own company, Mr. Jones has received many commissions to create dances for modern and ballet companies, including Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Boston Ballet, Lyon Opera Ballet, and Berlin Opera Ballet, among others. In 1995, Mr. Jones directed and performed in a collaborative work with Toni Morrison and Max Roach, Degga, at Alice Tully Hall, commissioned by Lincoln Center’s Serious Fun Festival. His collaboration with Jessye Norman, How! Do! We! Do!, premiered at New York’s City Center in 1999.

His work in dance has been recognized with the 2010 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award; the 2005 Wexner Prize; the 2005 Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award for Lifetime Achievement; the 2003 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize; and the 1993 Dance Magazine Award. His additional awards include the Harlem Renaissance Award in 2005; the Dorothy B. Chandler Performing Arts Award in 1991; multiple New York Dance and Performance Bessie Awards for his works The Table Project (2001), The Breathing Show (2001), D-Man in the Waters (1989) and the Company’s groundbreaking season at the Joyce Theater (1986). In 1980, 1981 and 1982, Mr. Jones was the recipient of Choreographic Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 1979 he was granted the Creative Artists Public Service Award in Choreography.

Mr. Jones was profiled on NBC Nightly News and The Today Show in 2010 and was a guest on the Colbert Report in 2009. Also in 2010, he was featured in HBO’s documentary series MASTERCLASS, which follows notable artists as they mentor aspiring young artists. In 2009, Mr. Jones appeared on one of the final episodes of Bill Moyers Journal, discussing his Lincoln suite of works. He was also one of 22 prominent black Americans featured in the HBO documentary The Black List in 2008. In 2004, ARTE France and Bel Air Media produced Bill T. Jones–Solos, highlighting three of his iconic solos from a cinematic point of view. The making of Still/Here was the subject of a documentary by Bill Moyers and David Grubin entitled Bill T. Jones: Still/Here with Bill Moyers in 1997. Additional television credits include telecasts of his works Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land (1992) and Fever Swamp (1985) on PBS’s “Great Performances” Series. In 2001, D-Man in the Waters was broadcast on the Emmy-winning documentary Free to Dance.

Bill T. Jones's interest in new media and digital technology has resulted in collaborations with the team of Paul Kaiser, Shelley Eshkar and Marc Downie, now known as OpenEnded Group. The collaborations include After Ghostcatching – the 10th Anniversary re-imagining of Ghostcatching (2010, SITE Sante Fe Eighth International Biennial); 22 (2004, Arizona State University's Institute for Studies In The Arts and Technology, Tempe, AZ); and Ghostcatching - A Virtual Dance Installation (1999, Cooper Union, New York, NY).

1 He has received honorary doctorates from Yale University, Art Institute of Chicago, Bard College, Columbia College, Skidmore College, the Juilliard School, Swarthmore College and the State University of New York at Binghamton Distinguished Alumni Award, where he began his dance training with studies in classical ballet and modern dance.

Mr. Jones’s memoir, Last Night on Earth, was published by Pantheon Books in 1995. An in-depth look at the work of Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane can be found in Body Against Body: The Dance and Other Collaborations of Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, published by Station Hill Press in 1989. Hyperion Books published Dance, a children’s book written by Bill T. Jones and photographer Susan Kuklin in 1998. Mr. Jones contributed to Continuous Replay: The Photography of Arnie Zane, published by MIT Press in 1999.

In addition to his Company and Broadway work, Mr. Jones also choreographed Sir Michael Tippet’s New Year (1990) for Houston Grand Opera and Glyndebourne Festival Opera. His Mother of Three Sons was performed at the Munich Biennale, New York City Opera and the Houston Grand Opera. Mr. Jones also directed Lost in the Stars for the Boston Lyric Opera. Additional theater projects include co-directing Perfect Courage with Rhodessa Jones for Festival 2000 in 1990. In 1994, he directed Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain for The Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, MN.

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Dancer Biographies

Antonio Brown, a native of Cleveland, OH, began his dance training at the Cleveland School of the Arts and received his BFA from The Juilliard School in 2007. Over the years he has performed works by Ohad Naharin, Jiri Kylian, Jose Limon, Nilas Martins, Susan Marshall, Larry Keigwin, Aszure Barton and many others. In addition to being a member of the Company, Mr. Brown also performs with Camille A. Brown & Dancers and Gregory Dolbashin’s “The DASH Ensemble”. Mr. Brown joined the Company in 2007 and is grateful to share his gifts and talents with the world.

Talli Jackson, originally from Liberty, NY, first trained with Livia Vanaver at the Vanaver Caravan Dance Institute in New York. With the Vanaver Caravan he performed in venues throughout the U.S. and Europe. Mr. Jackson has performed works by Marianela Boan, David Dorfman, Francesca Harper, Heidi Latsky and Sandy Silva. He received full scholarships from the American Dance Festival in 2006 and 2008, the Bates Dance Festival and the Ailey School. Mr. Jackson joined the Company in 2009.

Shayla-Vie Jenkins, originally from Ewing, NJ, began dance training at Watson Johnson Dance Theater and Mercer County Performing Arts School. In 2004, she graduated with honors from Fordham University. She has performed with The Kevin Wynn Collection, Nathan Trice Rituals, The Francesca Harper Project and Yaa Samar Dance Theater. In 2008, she was featured in Dance Magazine's "On The Rise" performers. Ms. Jenkins joined the Company in 2005.

LaMichael Leonard, Jr. is from Tallahassee, Florida. He began his professional dance career with Martha Graham Dance Company. He made is international debut in Athens, Greece soon after earning his BFA from New World School of the Arts in Miami, FL. LaMichael choreographs for the NBA’s Miami Heat Dance Team. Mr. Leonard has also performed with Buglisi Dance and West Coast Theatre Project. LaMichael has been dancing with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company since 2007.

I-Ling Liu, a native of Taiwan, received her BFA from Taipei National University of the Arts in 2005. She has performed with Ku and Dancers, Taipei Crossover Dance Company, Image in Motion Theater Company, Neo-Classic Dance Company and in works by Trisha Brown, Lin Hwai-Min and Yang Ming- Lung. Ms. Liu joined the Company in 2008.

Erick Montes joined the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company in 2003. He trained at the National School of Classical and Contemporary Dance in Mexico City, and in 2004 he was featured in Dance Magazine’s “25 To Watch”. He holds a fellowship in choreography from The New York Foundation for the Arts. He has presented his choreography in Mexico, Colombia, and Spain. In 2010 he worked in collaboration with choreographers Jennifer Nugent and Yin Mey in the creation of a Ballet for the National Dance Academy of Beijing, China.

Jennifer Nugent is originally from Miami, FL. She was a member of David Dorfman Dance and has performed with Martha Clarke, Daniel Lepkoff, Lisa Race, Nina Winthrop, Kate Weare, Bill Young, Colleen Thomas, Gerri Houlihan, and Dale Andre. She has been a guest artist at universities and dance festivals throughout the U.S., Russia, Korea and Vietnam. Ms. Nugent joined the Company in 2009.

Joseph Poulson, originally from Philadelphia, PA, received undergraduate and graduate degrees from the U. of Iowa and Bennington College, respectively. From 2000 to 2010 he was a member of Susan Marshall & Company, David Dorfman Dance, Bill Young/Colleen Thomas and Dancers, Creach/Co and acanarytorsi, receiving a BESSIE in 2009. He has also performed with Elena Demyanenko, Jeanine Durning, Mark Morris Dance Group, Lisa Race, Susan Scorbatti, Peter Schmitz, Will Swanson and Punchdrunk’s New York production of ‘Sleep No More’. Mr. Poulson is the newest company member having joined in summer 2012.

Jenna Riegel, a native of Fairfield, IA, has been a New York-based dancer, performer and teacher since 2007. Ms. Riegel holds an M.F.A. in Dance Performance from the University of Iowa and a B.A. in Theatre Arts from Maharishi University of Management. She has performed with Michel Kouakou’s Daara Dance, Carolyn Dorfman Dance Company, Tania Isaac Dance and Bill Young/Colleen Thomas & Company. She currently tours nationally and internationally as a company member of David Dorfman Dance, Alexandra/Beller Dances and johannes weiland.

Resident Artists

Bjorn G. Amelan (Creative Director/Set Designer) was the partner of the late fashion designer Patrick Kelly from 1983 until Mr. Kelly passed away on January 1, 1990. Mr. Amelan moved to the United States to begin his collaboration with Bill T. Jones in 1993. He has designed sets for the following works by Bill T. Jones: Green and Blue (1997) for the Lyon Opera Ballet; How! Do! We! Do! (1999) for Bill T. Jones and Jessye Norman, in conjunction with the Lincoln Center’s Great Performers New Visions series; We Set Out Early… Visibility Was Poor (1997), The Breathing Show (1999), You Walk? (2000), The Table Project (2001), Another Evening (2002), Verbum (2002), WorldWithout/In (2002), Black Suzanne (2002), Reading, Mercy and The Artificial Nigger (2003), Mercy 10 x 8 on a Circle (2003), Chaconne (2003), and Blind Date (2005) for the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. Mr. Amelan is the recipient of a 2001 “Bessie” for his designs of The Breathing Show and The Table Project.

Liz Prince (Costume Designer) has worked extensively with Bill T. Jones since 1990 designing for his company as well as his productions on: Boston Ballet, Berlin Opera Ballet and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Other work includes designing for: Doug Varone ( Doug Varone and Dancers, Jose Limon Dance Company, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company), Trey McIntyre, Mark Dendy, Mikhail Baryshnikov's White Oak Dance Project (Meg Stuart, Lucy Guerin), Tamar Rogoff (Claire Danes), PILOBOLUS, Neil Greenberg, Jane Comfort , Bebe Miller, Ralph Lemon, Arthur Aviles, Larry Goldhuber, David Dorfman and LAVA. Her costumes have been exhibited at: The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art and Snug Harbor Cultural Center. She received a 1990 New York Dance and Performance Award for costume design.

Robert Wierzel (Lighting Designer) has worked with artists in theatre, dance, new music, opera and museums, on stages throughout the country and abroad. He has worked with choreographer Bill T. Jones and his company since 1985. Projects include Blind Date, Another Evening/I Bow Down, Still/Here, You Walk?, Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land, How To Walk An Elephant, and We Set Out Early, Visibility Was Poor. Other works with Bill T. Jones include projects at the Guthrie Theatre, Lyon Opera Ballet, Deutsche Opera Ballet (Berlin), Boston Ballet, Boston Lyric Opera, the Welsh dance company Diversions, and London’s Contemporary Dance Trust. Robert has also worked with choreographers Trisha Brown, Doug Varone, Donna Uchizono, Larry Goldhuber, Heidi Latsky, Sean Curran, Molissa Fenley, Susan Marshall, Margo Sappington, Alonzo King and Joann Fregalette-Jansen. Additional credits include national and international opera companies, Broadway and regional theater. Mr. Wierzel is currently on the faculty of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Janet Wong (Associate Artistic Director) was born in Hong Kong and trained in Hong Kong and London. Upon graduation she joined the Berlin Ballet where she first met Bill when he was invited to choreograph on the company. In 1993, she moved to New York to pursue other interests. Ms. Wong became Rehearsal Director of the company in 1996 and Associate Artistic Director in August 2006.

Guest Artists

Ted Coffey (Story/Time Composer) makes acoustic and electronic chamber music, interactive installations, and songs. His work has been presented in concerts and festivals across North America, Europe and Asia, at such venues as Judson Church, The Knitting Factory, Symphony Space, and Lincoln Center (NYC), The Lab, New Langton Arts and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF), the Korean National University of the Arts (Seoul), The Loos Foundation (The Hague), and ZKM (Karlsruhe, Germany). Coffey’s electroacoustic composition has been featured at ICMC (2004, 2005, 2006), SEAMUS (2001, 2009, 2010, 2011), the Spark Festival (2009), the Third Practice Festival (2005, 2008, 2009), and the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival (2010), among others. In Open Space, Newton Armstrong described Coffey’s music as “subtle, weird and devoid of heroics. It’s the kind of music that resonates for days after you’ve heard it, and its spaces and gestures continue to form into new and extraordinary geometries.” His writings on the aesthetics and social politics of transmissive networks in the arts have been honored with significant awards from the Josephine De Kármán and Andrew C. Mellon Foundations. Coffey studied composition with Jon Appleton, Christian Wolff, Pauline Oliveros, Paul Lansky, and others, earning degrees at Dartmouth (AB), Mills College (MFA) and Princeton (MFA, PhD). He is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Virginia, where he teaches courses in composition, music technologies, critical theory, and pop. This is Coffey's first collaboration with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company.

Quotables

“[Jones’s] gifts: pungent, purposeful character development, compelling storytelling and pure-dance interludes of slippery and often deeply romantic choreography.” - Sarah Kaufman, The Washington Post

“These memories…are poignant, hilarious and sometimes terrifying.” - Robert Johnson, The Star-Ledger, on Story/Time

“…a dance theater rollercoaster with surprises around every corner.” - Claudia Bauer, The San Francisco Chronicle, on Story/Time

“Bill T. Jones unadorned is a revelation.” - Thea Singer, The Boston Globe, on Body Against Body

“Moment by moment the Jones/Zane choreography knows how to grab your attention. Pronounced contrasts of dynamics, space, direction and scale proliferate.” - Alastair Macaulay, The New York Times, on Body Against Body

“The river of choreography by Jones, Wong, and the dancers features Jones’ characteristically bold, juicy, unapologetically eclectic style…” - Deborah Jowitt, The Village Voice, on Serenade/The Proposition

“…the work of a mature artist at the peak of his powers… [Bill T. Jones] has created a thing of immense beauty and consequence.” - Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun-Times, on Fondly Do We Hope… Fervently Do We Pray

“Jones is larger than life and then some.” - David Wiegand, San Francisco Chronicle, on A Good Man

“Jones is not a choreographer in the sense that he just makes dances. He likes to tackle unlikely theatrical themes in unconventional ways…” - Hilary Ostlere, The Financial Times

“No other dancer-choreographer working today allows past, present, and future to mingle so freely in his body.” - Laura Jacobs, Vanity Fair

“Bill T. Jones, choreographer, philosopher, and political commentator, makes works of art that reflect the turmoil at the center of our society.” - Iris Fanger, The Patriot Ledger

“It's a great story, and one told with enormous verve in Bill T Jones's kaleidoscopic production. The dancing is ecstatic, the music lifts the spirits, and the stage is alive with movement.” - Michael Billington, The Guardian, on FELA!

March 14, 2011

Profile: Bill T. Jones, a master of modern dance After receiving Kennedy Center Honors, Bill T. Jones remembers his long career as a dancer and choreographer, and he discusses his future plans.

By Iris Fanger

Two men are dancing on stage, the small, tightly coiled white man darting around the 6-foot-1 black man who projects an elegant, riveting charisma. The year is 1981; they have been performing together for eight years. However it is still new that they are partnering each other in ways that men usually treat women – lifting each other, trading tender looks. Although there are established black companies in America by now, seldom are black dancers and white dancers seen side by side.

Bill T. Jones, the tall man, and Arnie Zane, his partner, talk out loud as they move, pushing another boundary. Zane recites a speech in Dutch, learned when he spent a period in Amsterdam. Jones recites the names of his 11 brothers and sisters.

Now, 30 years later, Jones is still speaking his mind, only this time as a trailblazer at the confluence of the avant-garde and commercial theater. You cannot miss his presence: His company will be performing in Arizona, California, North Carolina, Virginia, and New York this spring, while "FELA!" – his Broadway musical – starts its world tour in Lagos, Nigeria, in April and continues in London in the summer.

Born William Tass Jones in Florida to migrant workers, his family moved north when he was 3. Jones reaches back often to memories of family, race, and his mother's sustaining religious beliefs as he choreographs his works. Zane died in 1988 from complications of AIDS, but the company they formed in 1982 continues to bear his name.

Last year, Jones stood in the spotlight at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., to receive the nation's honors, along with Oprah Winfrey, Sir Paul McCartney, and others. Jones was recognized for his accomplishments as a striking performer and creator in the uniquely American art forms of modern dance and musical theater, not to mention the fearless reflection of political concerns in his work.

The clarity of his outspokenness barely masks the fact that he cares very deeply about his family, his friends and associates, and his country. "When I dance, as when I talk, I strive for candor," Jones says.

The Kennedy Center Honors capped his annus mirabilis, a year of marvels: three more Tony Awards for the Afro-beat Broadway musical "FELA!" which he choreographed and directed, to add to his 2007 Tony for "Spring Awakening." In January, "FELA!" was broadcast live to 375 screens in 21 countries from the stage of London's National Theatre. But Jones has not stopped wanting more. Returning early last month to the world of contemporary dance, he staged three works from those early years of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. "Body Against Body," a revival of pieces he created and performed with Zane, premièred last month at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art. Jones cast a man and a woman, rather than two men, in one of the duets.

"Arnie's no longer here. I'm not the same person. These works must now be seen for their ideas," Jones remarks, speaking by telephone for two interviews, and in person during the Boston weekend.

The idea of a dance studio was new to Jones when he met Zane and attended his first class in 1971, a year after he entered the State University of New York, Binghamton. He remembers dancing as a child with his brothers and sisters in their living room. "We were making up steps," he says. Even after starting classes, "I didn't dance with any great master," he recalls. "There were a lot of dance traditions besides the white man's modern dance."

Zane and Jones became a couple and collaborators on stage. Their works followed a path blazed by Merce Cunningham and the Judson Church experimentalists. Athletic moves and everyday tasks, stripped of décor and artifice, story and characterizations, became the stuff of their performances, enlivened by movement discovered through contact improvisation.

Since then, the dances that Jones has presented have ranged from provocative solos to pageantlike evenings, including works as controversial as "Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land" (1992), which dealt with issues of race, morality, history, and individual freedom of choice. "Last Supper" culminated in a finale that featured 50 to 100 nude bodies on stage – Jones included – chosen from volunteers of all ages in each city where the work was mounted during a two-year tour. The mass of critical approval was accompanied by an equal volume of protests. It was denounced by the Vatican.

Jones's reflections on the life and times of Abraham Lincoln, "Fondly Do We Hope... Fervently Do We Pray," performed by his dancers, several singers, and an actor-narrator, was commissioned by the Ravinia Festival in Illinois in 2009. It will be performed in Parma, Italy, May 7 and 8. Later this year, a feature-length film on the making of the Lincoln piece will be shown on PBS's "American Masters" series. The responsibility of running a 10-member company, even with a devoted staff, requires Jones to "keep feeding the beast," as he calls it, which means constantly creating new repertory. Now that "Fondly Do We Hope" has joined other works on tour, and "Body Against Body" is ready to go on the road, Jones is deep in plans for another.

"Story/Time" has been simmering in his mind as a way for him to return to the stage without having to dance – he cites a litany of physical problems. But he recently asked himself, "Where does Bill, the performer, come in? What do I want to do to come onstage? I thought about what I love to do. I love to talk."

He says he's been "intrigued" by composer John Cage's "Indeterminacy." The 1959 work comprises 90 stories by Cage, which he read into a microphone from one room, while pianist and composer David Tudor provided unplanned accompaniment from another.

"Some of the stories are 100 words long, others are 200 words, but each one is delivered in the same time, one minute each. He's not talking about the content of the stories," Jones says. "He's a composer, doing time. I'm hoping to tell my own 90 stories in a way that won't turn into a confession. I'm an emotional person; I have a lot of strong feelings, but what if I had to control that in some formal way, like time?"

Jones intends to make a work for the theater, set within a bank of images, while the audience is encouraged to watch and participate on their cellphones.

"It would be connecting my inner world, the stories, the ideals that move me, with an external world, [my dancers] and the audience, then another part of the external world, the social network," he says.

Meanwhile, Jones and his company have completed the move to combine Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and Dance Theatre Workshop into a new entity, New York Live Arts, conceived as a new model of an artist-led, producing/presenting organization. He sees the new institution as a chance for a "bigger cultural footprint," rather than just a focus on dance.

"For me, the big struggle has been to find a place in the world through identity, history, and love," Jones says. "Though I move on, I must always ask the questions: Whom do I love, and what values are worth holding on to?"

2010 Kennedy Center Honors

One wild ride to the mainstream By Sarah Kaufman Sunday, December 5, 2010

IN VALLEY COTTAGE, N.Y. It was opening night for the hip-quaking Afrobeat musical "Fela!" at London's National Theatre and, for a few minutes during the feverish encore, the director and choreographer became its impromptu star. Elated by the standing ovation and the thunderous proof that he'd won success before a notoriously staid British public, Bill T. Jones - forever a showman - sprang onstage and danced half-naked with cast members young enough to be his children.

In that moment, one of the dance world's great contrarians was made whole, his contradictions reconciled: the collaborator and the exhibitionist, the orchestrator of spectacles and the soloist, the crowd-pleaser and the loner.

"That audience was up, and that audience was hot," Jones recalls. He's curled up on the sofa in his home in this small Rockland County town about an hour outside New York City. It's a comfy picture: He's in his socks; there are stacks of art books and tribal rugs on the floor. Windows offer views of a sloping Japanese-style garden, a fluid terrain of boulders, shrubs and long-legged sculptures by Jones's partner, Bjorn Amelan, the set designer for Jones's modern-dance troupe, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. His home, in fact, feels like a set design, as if the rustic decor and tranquil landscaping have been composed to frame their owner, to make him "pop." And he does: Against his quiet surroundings, Jones looks retro-flamboyant in his thick black glasses, navy cardigan and plaid slacks - in blood red. Barry Goldwater meets the drama club.

Those pants assure us there's still some outrageousness in him. After all, we're talking about the dancer known to flash a sequined codpiece under his miniskirt. (That was in "Last Night on Earth," Jones's indelible 1992 solo in which he sang, improvised and mimed vigorous sex acts.) He has courted controversy throughout his 30-some year career, as an outspoken choreographer who has put issues of race and homophobia up front and finds beauty in surprising places ("Last Supper in Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land" showcased scores of naked Washingtonians). His works have drawn ire as well as praise. "Still/Here," which examined mortality and illness, was the subject of a laudatory Bill Moyers special on PBS; it was also denounced in the New Yorker and picketed by anti-gay activists.

At 58, Jones appears as lean and granite-muscled as ever. The only outward indicator of his age is the whisper of gray on his close-shaven head. But it's rare that this once-electrifying performer dances anymore. He let loose on that night in London two weeks ago "for the young people in the company who look at me as this older man who they work for, and they tremble in front of me - well, maybe they don't tremble, but I can be quite a monster," he says, his voice low and rolling, a mix of Nat King Cole, hot fudge and swallowed growls.

"At that moment I danced for them, I took my shirt off, all the things I only do when I feel very safe," Jones continues. "And it was an outpouring of love that just lifted me up. There were ladies pinching my [rear end]. I don't think they've ever had that at the National."

Oh yes, it's safe to say they've never had that at the National, house of Shakespeare - never seen anything like the explosive sensuality and blistering provocations that Jones funneled into "Fela!," plunging audiences into a two-hour dance party, fueled by the energy and loud, funky sound of Nigerian Afrobeat pioneer, polygamist and political activist Fela Anikulapo Kuti. It earned Jones this year's Tony Award for best choreography, to go with 2007's for "Spring Awakening," the rock musical about teen sexual tumult.

Jones's commercial success has been sudden, but not surprising. The depth of yearning he drew out of the young characters in "Spring Awakening" and the fierce pride and audacity that drive "Fela!" have their roots in the more than 100 works he has created for the dance company he founded in 1982 with his late partner Zane. From its beginnings, the troupe was diverse - Jones is black, and Zane, who died of complications from AIDS in 1988, was white. Inclusivity was an authentic quality for two gay men who were open to just about anything and anyone - one of their dancers weighed about 300 pounds. Jones's works show us the radiant beauty of the marginalized.

Combining dance, theater, text and multimedia, they look like none other: Consider the loopy vaudeville romp "A Quarreling Pair," based on a puppet play by Jane Bowles, and the wide-ranging meditation on Abraham Lincoln, "Fondly Do We Hope . . . Fervently Do We Pray," coming to the Kennedy Center Feb. 24-25. But you can also view Jones as a misfit, a polarizing gadfly-and since when does the establishment celebrate gadflies? This moment-hallelujah! - feels like some kind of cultural shift, a reversal of the culture wars.

Jones views the Kennedy Center Honors - which places him alongside mass-market entertainers Oprah Winfrey, Paul McCartney, Merle Haggard and Jerry Herman- with some amusement. "It must be for my formalism, right?" he says, eyebrows spiking wickedly.

He'll claim it for individualists everywhere. In pursuing an idiosyncratic path in a white middle-class art form, Jones has often been a loner. In his long career as a choreographer of the avant garde, he has never shied from weaving in the most intimate aspects of his personal story.

It was the deeply personal quality of his art, in fact, that led to him to the spotlight on Broadway and in London's National Theatre. Jones's understanding of "the role of art in society, art in politics, and being a black man in society" made him perfect for "Fela!," says producer Stephen Hendel, who landed Jones after seeing his company perform with a wild garage band. "Bill had the wiring to tell the story in a way that would be truthful, through movement . . . to bring out the force of the music."

Stepping out

The wiring was hard won. Born in Florida, Jones was the tenth of 12 children raised by migrant farmworkers. Earliest memory: a "phosphorescent-green snake" winding its way down a tree toward him as his sisters fixed him breakfast somewhere in South Carolina. Natural beauty and communal labor formed him. So did realities of race and class. His father, who could command the attention of any barroom, would physically transform himself when he encountered white men, avoiding eye contact and muttering "yes suh."

Jones mimes the posture, then lifts his head. "I'll be damned if I'll ever drop my eyes to anyone," he says evenly.

In 1970 he entered the SUNY Binghamton as a sprinter, but he left a dancer, having fallen in love with Zane and with dance. Eventually the pair moved to Manhattan, where they fell in with the austere experimental wing of modern dance. To do anything "popular" was to sell out.

But Jones, unlike most of his downtown colleagues, was too extroverted, too much of a people person to be entirely indifferent to his audience. Particularly in his own uninhibited and overtly sensuous dancing, he enjoyed playing to the public, as much as he might push into uncomfortable territory.

Back in the 1980s, he says, "Arnie and I were saying what was truly transgressive was to take our values intact into the mainstream." They kissed during curtain calls. One memorable evening in the early 1990s at the Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater, the company's male dancers gyrated stark naked at the footlights, forming a chorus line of merry jiggling. He can also raise eyebrows off the stage. In 2000, Jones walked away from a lucrative engagement at the Spoleto Festival USA to join the NAACP's protest of the Confederate flag at the Charleston, S.C., statehouse. Jones blasted the state's "troubling acquiescence to an historic symbol with brutal associations hurtful to many."

Jones "speaks out more than any other choreographer," says Leah Cox, a longtime company member. "I think it's part of what has made him somewhat of an outsider and a misfit. Much as he might wish it otherwise . . . he makes people a little bit on edge, because they know he's going to push and he's not going to remain quiet if he finds something suspicious."

He has at times frustrated the core of the dance world. In 1994, in an infamous six-page diatribe in the New Yorker, dance critic Arlene Croce proclaimed her refusal to see "Still/Here" because it was, as she termed it, "victim art . . . deadly in its power over the human conscience."

"Still/Here," which included videotaped interviews with the terminally ill, was an audience success, and roundly hailed by critics. But Croce's piece felt like "almost soul death," says Jones. It was also bewildering: "The thing that really unites all mankind is the fact that we're born, we grow and then we die. That's age-old. Shakespeare talked about that, and Euripides. So how did that turn into identity politics?"

Broadway has brought him a whole new public. First lady Michelle Obama attended "Fela!" in New York last month. In January, the National Theatre will beam live broadcasts of "Fela!" around the world; Washington's Sidney Harman Hall will screen it Jan. 17

Meanwhile, Jones is breaking new ground in the dance world by merging his company with New York's Dance Theater Workshop (DTW) a presenting organization - meaning it hosts performances and covers some of the artists' costs - that owns its own building in Chelsea. Jones's company will pay off most of DTW's $3 million debt.

The new nonprofit that the two organizations will form, pending approval in January by the New York State attorney general, will be called New York Live Arts. Jones's company, which like most dance troupes has had to rely on rented rehearsal space, will be headquartered in the building. It will perform small-scale works in the 200-seat theater every other year, and Jones will also serve as executive artistic director of the new entity, which will continue to present work, with his input.

"I want to feel the energy I felt at the National Theatre," says Jones. "They have their 'Hamlets' and obscure Scottish plays but there's also room for puppets and live music and lots of things." The new organization has "got to understand the world is changing and we can't sit by smugly and feel superior to pop culture. We have to go in there and participate."

His idea reflects a bit of a quarrel he has with the modern dance world.

"Modern dance," Jones says, drawing the words out with flourish, "it has made me what I am today." He chuckles aridly, gazes out at the garden.

"I've had an on-again, off-again love affair with it over the years," he says of the dance field. "Part of it is, I no longer want to be in the cool club, thumbing my nose at the bourgeoisie." He has tired of postmodern aloofness. Broadway "is where the edge was, where the power was, for me, and where the satisfaction was.

"Now, you pay for that satisfaction," he continues. Especially galling: glad-handing for publicity with those who know nothing of his dance company.

"It's, 'Now you've arrived because you won a Tony.' When that assumption is in the air, wait a minute, hold it, whoa, whoa, whoa." With a sweep of his arm, Jones holds off an imaginary entertainment press. "I come from a world that was taught that Broadway was actually the death of creativity."

He pauses, considers the tea Amelan has discreetly set before him. "But then it sounds like I'm biting the new hand that's being offered to me."

And by all appearances, that hand is wide open. Jones is in discussions about directing and choreographing another Broadway project, planned for 2013. He'll only divulge that it's based on a movie from the 1970s with soundtrack by an African American. "It's going to raise a lot of eyebrows," he says.

It's bound to. Busting us out of our comfort zones is his specialty. And heck, in this new stage of his artistic life, he's even challenging his own assumptions.

"When I first started out, it was, 'if it's for a lot of people it can't be good,' " says Jones. "I'm in another place now. I'm living in parallel universes."

Bill T. Jones' 'Story/Time': dance review

Claudia Bauer Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Modern yet wry, gorgeously danced and at times discordant, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company's "Story/Time," performed last weekend at Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall, is a dance-theater roller coaster with surprises around every corner.

Jones built his 30-year career on narrative, often cerebral dance-theater works like "Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land" and hit a mainstream peak with Tony Award-winning choreography for the musicals "Fela!" and "Spring Awakening." At 60 and retired from dancing, Jones found himself at the mid-career crossroads that bedevils so many successful choreographers: continue to produce work that your audience members expect, or try something new and hope they come to see it? Fortunately - for people who enjoy surprises - Jones chose the latter.

Bill T. Jones reads minute-long vignettes in random order from behind a desk A longtime admirer of John Cage, Jones took while members of his troupe dance to music by Ted Coffey in the innovative inspiration from the composer's 1958 project and involving "Story/Time." "Indeterminacy," in which Cage reads randomly Photo: Paul B Goode / Paul B Goode ordered one-minute stories over a score composed in isolation by David Tudor. To create "Story/Time," Jones wrote 150 minute-long vignettes; a selection of them are combined mostly by chance (brief sections are fixed in demi story arcs - this is Bill T. Jones, after all) into a 70-minute composition that is performed for two nights and then replaced.

At the emotional and physical center is Jones, who sits at a desk onstage reading the vignettes. Friday night's topics ranged from Amsterdam's red-light district, child abuse and McDonald's Happy Meals to grief, love and wonder. Jones is compelling when recalling his late partner, Arnie Zane, who died in 1988, at age 39; a minute later - literally - with deft comic timing Jones recounts the tale of Edward de Vere passing gas during an audience with Queen Elizabeth I.

Composer Ted Coffey is the Tudor to Jones' Cage, playing an acoustic and electronic collage of guitar, bass, vocal samples and inventive percussion - one section sounds like hammers banging on steel springs - live. Where Tudor and Cage were distant and cerebral, Coffey offers a warm and sometimes melodic complement to Jones's rich baritone speaking voice (although two deliberately overamplified sections were deafening). Atmospheric, ever-changing lighting enhanced the hypnotic effect.

Throughout, nine dancers dressed in yoga pants, bright T-shirts and hoodies orbit around Jones, executing 60-second increments of choreography that invoke both balletic technique and uninhibited modernity. One minute, duets and trios of dancers bend and swing their arms, semaphore-style, parallel with their lunging legs. The next, a dancer stands on another's shoulders and falls backward into the ensemble's outstretched arms. Later, men rolling across the stage encounter a woman and man performing unabashedly naked. Pulled in 70 directions, Jones' finely trained, fully committed dancers move as one, matching each other's intensity and fluidity with beautiful consistency.

Not every vignette is a winner (but give it a minute, and there'll be a new one), and random composition means that themes might repeat, which has a distracting effect. But Jones' gamble is exactly what makes "Story/Time" such a thrill: He's taking the risks, and we get to enjoy the ride.

In "Story/Time" choreographer Bill T. Jones' company takes a waltz down memory lane January 24, 2012 By Robert Johnson

If only we could plug in a cable, and download the contents of Bill T. Jones’ memory. The choreographer, now almost 60, has led a boldly adventurous life. Born to migrant farmers, he survived an education that included social upheaval and sexual free-for-alls, becoming a jet-setter who hobnobs with the greats. The choreographer shares a few of his experiences in “Story/Time,” a piece co-commissioned by Peak Performances at Montclair State University, where it received its premiere on Saturday. These memories, and some second-hand tales, are poignant, hilarious and sometimes terrifying. “Story/Time” includes from 50 to 70 vignettes, each delivered in approximately one minute. With this repertoire, Jones could spend the rest of his life dining out and appearing on talk shows, but eventually, of course, the stories end.

“You live and you learn,” Jones’ father used to tell him. Then Gus Jones would add, “You die, and you forget it all.” This impending dissolution of the self hangs over “Story/Time” like crepe-paper mourning. Stationed at a table center-stage, Jones looks solid if snow-capped, his body crisply outlined in a white shirt. Yet digital clocks tick off the seconds and the members of his Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company swirl around him, their youthful energies a foil to his recitation. He pauses occasionally for dramatic effect, but these silences are also a preview. Sometimes, like Schéhérazade, Jones seems to be telling stories to keep himself alive.

“Story/Time” was inspired by a John Cage lecture called “Indeterminacy” (90 stories in as many minutes) and Jones is paying tribute to the late composer and his partner, choreographer Merce Cunningham, whose company was abruptly terminated in December. Yet “Story/Time” feels gloomy where Cunningham’s “How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run”—a dance incorporating Cage’s lecture—was merely nostalgic.

Jones has followed Cunningham’s use of chance procedures to determine the order of the program, yet correspondences between dance and text reveal a guiding hand. Dancers roll across the floor, their clothes smoking as if on fire, as Jones recalls his mother in a paroxysm of grief. Various combinations of dancers

portray a recurring story about a criminal landlord. “Story/Time” has been carefully pruned to make it easy to digest. The dancers are slick and elegant movers, and Jones is not above supplying a snappy ending.

How much “Story/Time” recycles Jones’ earlier works is unclear. The catch-me-I’m-falling group exercise appeared in “Blind Date;” and the story of Noah and the Flood was central to “Another Evening: I Bow Down.” Some overlapping partnering moves recall “Monkey Run Road,” and the whole evening seems to develop the concepts of Jones’ solo “As I Was Saying.” Yet “Story/Time” is not exactly a Cunningham “Event.”

Set designer Bjorn G. Amelan has supplied transparent room-dividers and a sofa, wryly suggesting that Jones’ memories resemble mental furniture. Much of this brilliant work, set to an eclectic score by Ted Coffey, depends upon a tension between the immediacy of lived experience—dancing, or biting into a juicy, green apple—and our subsequent need to measure, re-arrange and transmit our impressions before they vanish forever.

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Dances with stories by Bill T. Jones & Co.

Article by: Caroline Palmer, Special to the Star Tribune | February 17, 2012

REVIEW: Jones explores interplay of movement and words, as well as music and the element of chance.

Bill T. Jones performs his “life piece” at a recent residency week at the Walker. Photo by: Tom Wallace

Before launching into his radically engaging new work "Story/Time" at the Walker Art Center choreographer Bill T. Jones leads the audience in a "conceptual warm-up" exercise. He asks us to raise a hand when we think a minute has passed. Most everyone is early by several seconds. It's the first of many instances during the evening when we are reminded that time is not a fixed concept. It shifts and bends according to circumstances -- many beyond our control.

"Story/Time" is comprised of 70 one-minute long stories written and read by Jones, a maverick mover who remains seated at a desk for the duration. The nine members of his New York-based troupe swirl around him on a stage marked off with a numbered grid. Chance procedures govern some content and performance order. These elements reference the visionary John Cage, whose 1958 piece "Indeterminacy" inspired Jones to take a new direction in his own work.

What starts out as a seemingly intellectual exercise quickly becomes something else altogether -- an evolving personal account. Time is a basis for structural organization but it doesn't wield a tyrannical influence. The dancing and storytelling complement one another yet also compete for attention -- intentionally and provocatively. Different senses are triggered simultaneously by the subject matter and the dynamic interactions between the dancers as well as the dreamlike sound score by Ted Coffey resonating from different parts of the theater.

The work is autobiographical in parts but it also relies on fiction, vocalization and silence. Its narrative arc has more to do with an assemblage of events ranging from the mundane to the extraordinary -- and how each influences the other. 1 Jones' writing is spare and powerful, addressing such difficult topics as the death of his father, his mother's grief and the death of his longtime partner and artistic collaborator, Arnie Zane.

The movement reinterprets these brief flashes of memory or insight but rarely reacts to them directly. Each dancer adds a vital energy that enlivens the words and affirms the power of being present in every moment. Interplay of light and darkness is also important, suggesting an emotional landscape defined by the extremes of experience. It is through the perspectives of others we often find something familiar, fulfilling and true. Something we couldn't have seen otherwise. Jones delivers an opportunity for such reflection with "Story/Time."

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February 6, 2011

Back to the Black Box: Bill T. Jones On Reprising His Roots

By Kris Wilton

Bill T. Jones has a long history of pushing envelopes and challenging audiences. In the 1970s, when he was getting his start in New York's downtown dance scene, it was by the pioneering way he - a long, strong, six-foot-one African-American man - partnered with his lover and collaborator Arnie Zane, a five-foot-four Jewish-Italian. Later, it would be by revealing his HIV status - but refusing to serve as a poster boy for the sweeping epidemic - and still later for exploring mortality in works like Still/Here, which featured real people talking about death, life, and illness in a work New Yorker critic Arlene Croce called "victim art," and flatly refused to see (but not to review). Most recently, Jones explored race and history inFondly Do We Hope... Fervently Do We Pray, a challenging work commissioned for a festival honoring Abraham Lincoln, and announced an impending merger with New York's Dance Theater Workshop in a new venture to be called New York Live Arts, a move that rattled some dance-world insiders.

This weekend, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company will premiere at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston Body Against Body, which comprises duets originally choreographed and performed by Jones and his late partner Arnie Zane in the 1970s and 80s, including Continuous Replay (1978),Blauvelt Mountain (1980), and Monkey Run Road (1979), some of which have not been seen since. Spare, athletic, and angsty, they are works produced in a different time, by, as Jones might say, a different Bill T. Jones: before he and Zane would be diagnosed, on the same day, with HIV, and Zane would die of AIDS-related illness in 1988, before Jones's commercial successes on Broadway with Spring Awakening, which he choreographed, and Fela, which he co-conceived, directed, and choreographed, before the Tony Awards for those productions, before receiving a Kennedy Center Honor alongside Oprah Winfrey and Paul McCartney last December, and before building a new life with partner Bjorn Amelan, also the company's creative director.

Brainy, statuesque, and inspiringly vital, Jones is a joy to engage. We spoke by phone about the premiere, his legacy, where dance is moving, and his upcoming projects (including Superfly, the musical). If Body Against Body was the first work of yours a person was going to see, what would you tell them?

Wow. They've heard about Spring Awakening, they've heard about Fela, and now they're going to go and see two guys pushing a box around on the floor and talking to each other and repeating rudimentary gestures over about 50 minutes? Well, I think you should tell them that they're seeing seminal works from a person who is now in a second or third phase of his career and that this could be an evening that explains how artists truly develop and evolve. They should come knowing that they're only going to see a facet of who this man is. And it behooves them to give themselves to it, learn what they can, and then compare it to something like the Lincoln project, which is a very big, public-spectacle work, and then understand how difficult it is to sum up what an artist does in one piece. Also, I'd tell them to watch themselves watching this work and ask themselves, What do you think these young guys were being fed on at that time: literally, culturally, philosophically? What were they trying to express, what were they obsessed with? That's a lot. But I think that would be a fair way for a person to come.

What is it like to return to these pieces 30 years later, when so much has happened to you, and you've shifted your focus so much from what you were doing at the time?

You mean that I've grown? That life has not stood still? It's like asking a person about their youth, in a way. When we were reprising Blauvelt Mountain maybe 10, 11 years ago, I was worrying whether a new generation of dancers could do work that was so intimate to my relationship with my companion, and Deborah Jowitt, the Village Voice dance critic said to me, "Bill, get out of the way of the work." That was kind of a zen moment - a zen slap, if you will. I was being extremely self- concerned, and not thinking of the work as independent of my own life or career. I feel in some ways that I've gotten over that hurdle now, but there's also a bit of a sadness that comes with it. It used to be, in some ways, the language of our love, between me and Arnie Zane. Of all the billions of people on the planet, he was the only other person who knew that part. Now other people know it. That is a wonderful thing. But it also says that the initial conversation is no more.

I keep thinking about the Marina Abramovic retrospective at MoMA last year, where they took these intense, passionate, powerful, dangerous, sometimes scary performances that she had done alone or with her lover, Ulay, and reprised them with these mostly very young, very beautiful dancers and performers, and how the pieces were really very different...

Well yes, I know exactly what you're getting at. That is the lesson that time and experience teaches us, again and again: that if your work is truly made for the world -- and Arnie and I certainly wanted our work made for the world -- there will come a time when the work must have a life independent of yourself. This raises questions about your ability to communicate intention, about your sincere ability to see the work, or hear the work speak to you. Sometimes the work is telling you, "Look at me, I can be this. I can be this, too. I am not only what you think I am. I am something else."

How did you select which dancers would perform which pieces?

That's much more difficult. When we were re-doing Blauvelt for the first time, I thought our body types - Arnie Zane was 5'4", I'm 6'1" - were essential to the problems of leverage and power sharing in the work, so we need to find a short man and a tall man. But that seemed kind of tone deaf to the fact that our company now had women, so I tried to ignore gender and just find the people in the company who could remember the instructions, which are quite complicated. Who can do it? Who can handle it intellectually? Who can handle it physically? I have now decided a couple of things. I could be wrong, but I don't think it works between two women. Two men don't necessarily guarantee that it works either. I am lucky enough to have a couple in the company, Jennifer Nugent and Paul Matteson, who have a close relationship to the ethos that informed Arnie and I. They understand the tone of the piece, the way the partnering and athleticism has to work. She is extremely strong and very androgynous looking; he is a handsome and fiercely intelligent animal mover. They bring something to it.

The work I'm dying to see is Monkey Run Road, which has not been seen since we first started doing Blauvelt, probably sometime in the 1980s. Janet Wong, my rehearsal director, has taught the combinations to a whole host of people. There are two men - Erick Montes, a small, Mexican man, and Talli Jackson, a mixed-race man, a big guy - who have a sense of the fierceness of the physical. The other part is there's talking in it, there's singing in it, there's kind of a wry and ironic distance that we had from the material, Arnie and I. They are working on that.

I don't want this question to sound impertinent, but if these works were avant-garde when you made them, are they still avant-garde today?

Well, you know, people in the avant- garde are embarrassed by use of the term now. Nobody uses it - it sounds a little uncool, self-conscious and art-historical. And it tends to place the practitioner in a kind of a box, a place that doesn't allow you to get your roots down in the moment. But the works are still challenging, and when people applaud at the end of a piece like Blauvelt, they have been on a journey with you; it's like watching a long-distance race, and they're wondering if you'll make it. It's challenging, and it's not for everybody. And if that's the definition of avant-garde, then I suppose they are.

Your career has taken you everywhere from the avant-garde to Broadway. Which works do you think have been the most radical, or challenging, or have changed the perspective of the most people?

I think Blauvelt changed a lot of people's ideas about partnering, because of the way in which Arnie and I partnered. And Uncle Tom's Cabin was seen by many, many people - some of whom were in what you call the avant-garde, and never thought of me as a black man who wanted to find a black voice - and the end of the piece had 52 naked people of every shape and size and color on stage, with my fully clothed, churchgoing mother amongst them, praising god. I think there were a lot of assumptions about the alienated, secular avant-garde being challenged in that work. Still/Here dealt with the issues of mortality at a time obsessed with AIDS. To this day people are still confused about what that work was. The shorthand is it was a piece about AIDS, but it was a an age-old topic about life and death and mortality - the human condition, if you will. Most of the people who were resources for it, in the videos and so on, were not in the dance world, and as a result, it reminded people once again of how this art form can actually participate in the public discourse, and not just the art-journal discourse. That was pretty radical. And it's taught to this day in departments around the country, and I dare say around the world. So take your pick.

It's not very often that you can say that dance is participating in the public discourse.

No, it isn't, and you definitely pay for it when you do, because dance is controlled by an academic and critical establishment that has very particular notions about what is valid. But you know, that's not really how history is written, and that's not really how the levers of culture operate.

I was watching the Kennedy Center Honors this year and thinking about how the public still has so little access to dance. And I don't just mean physical access; I mean mental or intellectual access. Oh, it's true. I hit the art world in the 70s, and it was supposed to be the revolution of dance; people were saying that dance was the future. What happened to that? Why does PBS do so little dance programming anymore? How often does one see dance programming of any description on the major networks?

And what you see is just the Nutcracker...

...And the proliferation of reality shows like So You Think You Can Dance, and Dancing With the Stars. And if a person knows anything about the development of theatrical dance, those shows have very little to do with what we call dance. But culture is kind of a thick-skulled creature. You can yell at it all you like, you can badger it, but you have to find other ways to help this creature develop a taste for what you think they should be tasting.

My god, when I look at the young Internet generation thinks culture is, I'm sometimes really disheartened: they're not very well educated, and they can be extremely conservative. What we called "the body" was this great, wonderful metaphor for human struggle and all, I think for a lot of them the body is explained third-hand or fourth-hand, on Facebook.

Let's get back to the ICA, and your panel discussion with Karole Armitage and Elizabeth Streb, "The Making of a Choreographer," on Feb. 5. What can we expect? I'm so excited!

Me too! What the devil is that going to be? It's about mentorship and the choreographic process, and I think you're going to get the benefit of three people who are good talkers, who are passionate about what they do, talking about how knowledge is passed from one generation to another. This is a very important topic. I think it's always been a point of pride in the world of dance that one person, communicating something, showed it to someone else. It wasn't like you wrote it down; you had to be there in that space with them. I suspect, that in a world that still has people coming to have a communal experience, to come into a theater and watch live people on stage, it will always be that.

Why is Body Against Body premiering in Boston rather than in your home turf of New York?

They're small-scale works, and they really don't benefit from being seen on large stages, where we normally perform. When we prepared this program, we asked partners across the country who are interested in works that have a historical interest to them, and that, because of the rigor or the demands for an audience, may not be for a broad popular audience, but for, let's say, a museum audience. The ICA has been distinguishing itself as being one of the most adventurous places around the country for this sort of work, and they invited us to come and do it for them.

So what's next?

The company's new works are going in two directions. One is a work I'm calling Storytime. It started out as a way for me to get back onstage, doing what I like to do, which is tell stories. It's inspired by John Cage's famous work Indeterminacy, where I think he tells 90 stories in 90 minutes, with David Tudor performing chance procedures in sound terms parallel to it. I found that so intriguing that I'm writing my own 90 stories. How will my company be integrated into that? That's where the fun starts.

Then there's the new commercial theater work. Which right now we're beginning workshops on. It's based on a 1970s film, set in Harlem... well, no need to be coy about it: it's Super Fly the musical.

Amazing!

I know! I'm just trying to figure out how to give it that kind of spin that keeps it fun and entertaining. How can we take this antihero and spin him? Maybe with the help of some A-list songwriters - they're already getting interested in the project - and with lots of dance in it. Dance that's not just do the hustle, and do the bump, abut that really pushes the envelope the way Fela pushed the envelope around Afrobeat dancing.

When Super Fly came out, weren't you mired in your experimental, minimalist...

Yes! But like everyone, we were fascinated by it. You have to realize: this is not a blaxploitation film likeShaft or Foxy Brown. It's more like an independent art film in the vein of John Cassavetes. It's made by a photographer, Gordon Parks Jr., and it's extremely photographic. Yes, it has its tropes we associate with pimps, hos, drug dealers, and all, but it also has a wonderful score by Curtis Mayfield that was nominated for an Academy Award that year. So there's a lot in it, and we have some high-powered, very adventurous producers as well. You have a lot going on. Enough rope to hang myself with. Let's leave it there.

All photos courtesy Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. From top: Bill T. Jones; Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, by Lois Greenfield; from Body Against Body (2); from Fondly Do We Hope; Fervently Do We Pray (2); Super Fly movie poster

Dance review: Bill T. Jones at Wolf Trap

By Sarah Kaufman, Published: August 1

Photo by Linda Davidson/THE WASHINGTON POST - Members of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company perform as Jones reads his one- minute works at the premiere of “Story/Time.”

In his long career, Bill T. Jones has gone from experimental downtown artist to two-time Tony winner. Bridging such different worlds makes for an uncomfortable perch, from which he must contend with purists who question his authenticity and Broadway operators who ignore his past 30 years in the arts.

Jones is not one to ignore his own discomfort. His new work, “Story/Time,” which the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company performed at Wolf Trap on Tuesday night, seems to be a way of reconciling his postmodern roots with his success as a showman.

Jones told the audience that “Story/Time” was a homage to John Cage, whom he dubbed a “20th-century music man.” Jones was honoring him as a word man, however: In 1958, Cage created a work called “Indeterminacy,” in which he sat alone onstage, reading aloud a series of one-minute stories he’d written. This is what inspired “Story/Time.”

In a program note, Jones writes that the piece is “an opportunity for me to return to the stage in a low-key, non-popular performance-art mode.” Channeling Cage’s eye for the quirkiness of daily life, Jones penned a sheaf of his own one-minute stories. Using the sort of random selection that Cage and his partner, the choreographer Merce Cunningham, favored, he chose 70 and read them from behind a desk in his booming, velvety voice.

Unlike Cage, Jones was not alone: His nine dancers swirled around him, sometimes in a group, sometimes not, while composer Ted Coffey performed an electronic score. Robert Wierzel’s lighting design spotlighted Jones as a kind of rumpled deity, in a blinding white T-shirt and loose green pants. The dancers were bathed in a softer, moonlit glow — the mute demigods to Jones’s thundering Zeus.

1 Bjorn Amelan’s spare set design was little more than a few panels of suggestive architecture and some simple furniture, but it conjured worlds. All in all, this was one of the most provocative and stimulating dance events that safe, predictable Wolf Trap has hosted in recent years.

Even the weather felt perfect, with a cool breeze lending its own element of pleasure.

The subjects of Jones’s mini-narratives ranged from historical snippets (cocaine use among railway workers and its spread through rural black communities) to first-person accounts (ruminations on his garden in winter, with birds “fluffed and plumped against the cold”). A digital counter loomed over his head, tallying up the passing minutes, but Jones didn’t need it to emphasize the theme of time. That was in his stories, in the interesting, understated music — particularly in the girlish innocence of Blossom Dearie, singing a few lines of “They Say It’s Spring.” And in more nuanced ways, it was in the dancing.

The past, the seasons, memories of his parents and of his late partner, Zane: “Story/Time” wasn’t just a chance for Jones to get back into the spotlight. It was a way to review his life in manageable bits. It was an oral slideshow of wide-ranging experience, often tinged with unrest. He recalls Zane’s death and gives us a snapshot of his vibrant, reckless life. He tells us how sex workers taunted him on a trip overseas (meanwhile, his dancers arrange the panels into a window frame, and pose alluringly within it). He takes us to Cunningham’s apartment, where the venerable artist pantomimes a cat.

“What has never changed in your work over the years?” Jones remembers being asked by an audience member one time after a Kennedy Center performance. “Doubt,” he replied. “It burns . . . like . . . fire.”

Also unchanged was the loose-jointed, luxurious ease of his dancers. The stage was a field of play as they chased one another around, dropping and rolling. There were some agitated solos, occasional flashes of violence and casual virtuosic surprises — a leg thrown to the ear; a sailing, sustained turn.

If these were moments of heaven, by the end we seemed to be angling toward hell, with the stage in dark shadows. A dancer rolled slowly across it and smoke billowed out of his clothing, as if his flesh were smoldering.

“You live, you learn, and you forget it all,” Jones told us his father used to say.

But the choreographer had his own coda: “You live, you learn, you forget it all . . . and then you die.”

True story, indeed.

2

February 7, 2011 In a new era of dance, early works still resonate Jones restages duets crafted with Zane By Thea Singer

Bill T. Jones unadorned is a revelation.

Before his sprawling investigations of faith and multimedia extravaganzas, before his audience-baiting solos and Kennedy Center honors, Jones was half of a duo — in life and work — that was passionate about experimentation in dance.

In the ’70s and ’80s, Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, who died in 1988, crafted quasi-improvisational yet formalist duets that grappled with the space where private meets public. Playing off each other, they plumbed the push and pull of identity politics, why freedom both releases and constrains us, how presentation creates meaning. Theirs was a repertoire of dynamics, both physical and personal, where emotion seeped through abstraction.

Three of those early works, restaged by Jones, comprised the world premiere “Body Against Body.’’

“Monkey Run Road’’ (1979), by Jones and Zane, is the most nonchalant yet mind-opening of the lot. It’s actually a dance for three: two men and a large wooden box that the pair push around the stage, sit on in characteristic poses, and even fall headfirst inside. Alternating as watchers and doers, they create a series of moving pictures to Helen Thorington’s humming, creaking score and spoken text. Erick Montes’s hands rise as if pulled by marionette strings, then dangle like paws. Talli Jackson later echoes the sequence, but the pulling is between two fists. Montes crouches, his hands as tiny horns on his head. Jackson stretches into a lunge arcing his sternum to the sky. The phrases repeat and travel backward, speed up, and change direction — showing us that what we see is sometimes what we get, but sometimes so much more. Minimalism, we realize, can have epic proportions.

“Continuous Replay’’ grew from Zane’s 1977 “Hand Dance.’’ Clad in layers, Zane slipped through variations of 45 gestures. Jones’s restaging adds people — there are 11 — and removes clothes: Everyone starts off naked. It’s an exercise in accumulation: people, movements, John Oswald’s music, even wardrobe accumulate as the piece progresses. Led by the powerful Peter Chamberlin as timekeeper, the dancers start in profile upstage, travel down one side, and across the apron, sweeping and darting and clacking their arms inside Robert Wierzel’s shafts of light.

“Blauvelt Mountain (A Fiction)’’ (1980) is a serious game of word and movement association. In this revision of the Jones- Zane duet, Jones casts a woman with a man. The give-and take swings from gentle (a whisper in an ear) to aggressive (a knock upside the head). Taut barrel turns beget seat straddles beget spins on knees. The relationship intrigues, but the dance goes on too long.

If only there had been projections of the original works against the restagings. Juxtaposing past with present would have shown the distance Jones and dance in general have traveled and how context can change the very meaning of a work.

Photo: Talli Jackson (top) and Erick Montes perform “Monkey Run Road’’ during the world premiere of “Body Against Body’’ at the Institute of Contemporary Art. (Matthew J. Lee/Globe Staff)

Continuous Renewal: Great Dance Soars Again in American Dance Festival Reconstruction

By Kate Dobbs Ariail June 16, 2011 - Durham, NC

The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, led since Zane’s death in 1988 by his partner Bill T. Jones, has long been an American Dance Festival favorite. Jones is a rare creature: a preternaturally powerful dancer who has become one of the greatest, most intellectual choreographers of our time, while maintaining his own splendidly open and direct kineticism through his 10-member company. Jones’ rigorous mind ranges over many topics, and he crafts his dances to suit them, so one never knows quite what a program will offer, except that it will include stunning dancing — chests open, arms out, heads up — carried out by beautiful, thinking, feeling human bodies.

In the ADF’s first regular Durham Performing Arts Center performances this season, the finale is the glorious, wrenching D-Man in the Waters, first choreographed by Jones in 1989, not long after the death of his partner, Arnie Zane, with whom he had developed a dance language flexible and clear enough to explore identity issues and make social commentary without sacrificing any of the prerogatives of dance. This ADF-sponsored reconstruction is based on the 1998 revision of the work. It is set to Felix Mendelssohn’s Octet for Strings in E- flat major, Op. 20, well played by members of the Durham Symphony Orchestra.

D-Man takes place in a world in which the normal medium for breathing and moving has become watery. The dancers are buoyed by it; submerged and buffeted; frustrated, cleansed and freed. The invisible waters separate them, and bring them together. They dive under; they breach the surface. They become the water — the tide at the moment when it turns, going both in and out from the shore, the waves tugging at each other from with opposing forces. All the lifting, carrying, rescuing actions become a poignant reversal of the old litany: In the midst of life, we are in death. Yet death the all-powerful destroyer is mocked again and again by the surging life of dancing bodies. Death will take all the bodies, but new ones will take their places — as in this reconstruction — and Death can never take the Dance.

Two wonderful pieces precede the intermission. The evening opens with Spent Days Out Yonder (2000), to the andante from Mozart’s String Quartet No. 23 in F Major, K 590, also played live by four members of the DSO. The sprightly music brings out lovely rippling movements, and the foursquare arrangement of the dancers emphasizes its uncompromising structure. Bill T. Jones makes great use of his dancers’ backs, which tend to be remarkably wonderful to look at, and in the first part of this dance, we are treated to a trio of them. The dancers don’t look our way — they are looking out yonder — they separate us from their vision just as much as they conjure it for us.

The program’s middle work, Continuous Replay, would be the show-stopper for your average dance troupe, but here is a hot warm-up for our cool plunge into the waters that will follow. Originally choreographed by Arnie Zane in 1977, the work was revised by Bill T. Jones in 1991, and includes a haunting, delicate soundscape by John Oswald that seems critical to the richness of the conception. A fair number of dancers take their clothes off on stage, but few stride naked onto the stage and later add garments. Led by Erick Montes as “the clock,” the dancers gradually form a line across the stage. They stand sideways to the proscenium, so that we may see their profiles in Robert Wierzel’s canny lighting, and periodically turn their heads to look at us. As they build a series of bird-like movements and gestures, still in the line, they begin to glisten with sweat, and the light picks up that gloss, while it sculpts the shadows. Especially in the large steps and lunges with the downstage legs, the dancers look like they were lifted from ancient Greek vase paintings, in which men and birds combine identities. Once they break free of the line, change and interchange take over, in a rather comic perversion of Escher-like patterning. Into the glorious nudity comes a man in black socks. Here comes a woman in a snug leotard. After a number of tight black garments appear, flowing white ones begin to take their places. The cyclic feel of this work is so strong that you may imagine it repeating, again and again, just out of your line of vision, long after it has played out on stage.

This highly recommended program continues June 17-18. See sidebar for details. Also recommended is a new film about Jones and his creative process. A Good Man premiered at the Full Frame Festival in Durham this spring; ADF is featuring it during its International Screen Dance Festival on June 26, after which it will run on PBS in the fall. Taken together, this concert and the film offer an unusual opportunity to delve into a great living artist’s oeuvre — past, present and future possible.

Arts&LEISURE SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2009

Bill T. Jones Salutes His Friend Lincoln

By CLAUDIA LA ROCCO

ILL T. JONES is fond of saying that when he was growing up, Abraham Lincoln was the one white man he was allowed to love unconditionally. Sometimes he includes John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert as Bwell. It’s a catchy sound bite, the sort that comes in handy for people who often find themselves in the spotlight. And it has served Mr. Jones well over the last two years, as he has undertaken one of the most ambitious and challenging projects of an ambitious and challenging career: a commission by the Ravinia Festival in Illinois to create a dance-theater work celebrating the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth. But stop to consider, given the context, the full import of that line, uttered by this 57-year-old black man. Born to migrant farmworkers in the South, he rose to become one of the most prominent and provocative American choreographers of his generation, a scarred veteran of the culture wars and a Tony Award winner for his work on “Spring Awakening.” “Fela!,” his acclaimed Off Broadway musical about TODD HEISLER/THE NEW YORK TIMES the Nigerian composer and musician Fela Anikulapo Kuti — which he directed and choreographed — opens Nov. 23 on Broadway. Bill T. Jones during a rehearsal break: “I want to participate in the world of ideas.” For someone so preoccupied by politics and history, the Lincoln commission represented an enormous — and risky — opportunity, one Mr. Jones at first declined because his company doesn’t take on projects with mandated themes. “I feel my entire artistic life is flying at me like an asteroid belt,” he said during a final intense rehearsal period in New York recently. “I’ve been entrusted with so much.” It’s easy to see why his longtime collaborator and companion Bjorn G. Amelan would describe the Lincoln piece, “Fondly Do We Hope ... Fervently Do We Pray,” which will have its premiere on Sept. 17 and then embark on a lengthy tour, as weighing more heavily on Mr. Jones’s shoulders than any work he can remember. And he has created it during a remarkable time, when the United States has been in the throes of another historic campaign and presidency, two wars and an economic collapse: all echoes keenly felt by Mr. Jones, never an artist to lock himself in the studio. A hard-staring, chiseled man who favors an elegant speaking style, even in grueling rehearsal days, Mr. Jones described the country as fractured by much more insidious and ambiguous conflicts than the divisions during Lincoln’s time. “Who are the good guys and the bad?” he asked, adding that one note he was trying to sound in the piece was ambivalence. “Is it a war? I just think there’s a mess.” Almost two years earlier, while beginning to immerse himself in what would come to be about 15 Lincoln books and half as many documentaries, he spoke of being afraid of the immense task. “I feel Abraham Lincoln is a kind of spirit that inhabits a ghost world called Lincoln World on the planet of Kitsch,” he said, laughing. “He’s a real spirit, but I have to go find him.” By October 2008, with Barack Obama’s presidency looking likely and Mr. Jones intent on using the Civil War era as a mirror for today’s world while avoiding heavy- handed parallels, the task was no longer abstract. He described himself as “trying to turn myself inside out to make Lincoln’s legacy be about what I have always felt it was about: something about human rights, and something about a politician who truly jumps head and shoulders above the discourse of his time.” Walking a fine line between formalism and storytelling, Mr. Jones has incorporated video by his associate artistic director, Janet Wong, and a score by Jerome Begin, Christopher Antonio William Lancaster and George Lewis Jr. that layers folk songs and classical music from Lincoln’s day with original compositions. His movement, created by the dancers and edited by Mr. Jones and Ms. Wong, is set against these elements and a script that draws on Lincoln, Walt Whitman and the biographies of Mr. Jones and his performers. “He has his doubts about a government of the people, by the people, for the people, but he keeps it to himself,” reads the biography of a man born in 1952 (Mr. Jones’s name is not used, but the parallels are obvious), recited onstage by the actor Jamyl Dobson. “He is surprised that he never stops believing in great men, though he keeps it to himself.” The performers move through these loaded words amid Mr. Amelan’s imposing set of movable white columns and sheer oval scrim that sometimes encloses the stage. Executing roiling phrases that resolve into sweeping tableaus or fragment and scatter, the dancers slip in and out of character. Layers of meaning cohere and then complicate themselves, playing a tug of war between accessibility and abstraction. “I wanted someone iconoclastic, someone a little dangerous,” said Welz Kauffman, Ravinia’s president, explaining his decision to offer Mr. Jones the centerpiece of Ravinia, a major dance and music festival near Chicago. “I wanted someone I could share with my Ravinia audience in a spectacular way. He’s got a political bent, which I wanted.” Nigel Redden, the director of Lincoln Center Festival and a longtime admirer, is presenting the work in 2010. “Bill has always been politically engaged in an oblique way,” he said. “He spoke about it in a way that made me sit up and take notice.” The festival is now a co-commissioner. Born in Bunnell, Fla., Mr. Jones was the 10th of 12 children. He burst on to the contemporary New York dance scene in the 1970s with his partner, Arnie Zane. Mr. Zane died in 1988, part of a generation of artists lost to AIDS. But Mr. Jones, though H.I.V.-positive, is healthy, and the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, with a current budget of $2.6 million, has endured for more than 25 years, quite a milestone in the economically fragile dance world.

Continued on Page 5 THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2009 5 DANCE

TODD HEISLER/THE NEW YORK TIMES Bill T. Jones Salutes His Friend Lincoln

inappropriate, but I kind of love that From Page 1 old-school thing about him.” Mr. Jones acknowledged his temper As part of an openly gay biracial but didn’t apologize for it. “I know couple, and as an artist unafraid there’s a certain irateness in me,” he to tackle big, thorny subjects, he said. “But I am trying to do my job. I endured his share of firestorms. The don’t have to be cuddly.” most famous came in 1995, when In making his way toward the Arlene Croce, then The New Yorker’s Ravinia commission, he had already revered, powerful dance critic, created two less ambitious Lincoln labeled “Still/Here,” a work about works: “Serenade/The Proposition,” people with terminal illnesses, as a nuanced rumination on history that unreviewable “victim art” and chose had its premiere at the 2008 American to write about it without seeing it. Dance Festival, and “100 Migrations,” But times have changed. The a community piece seen later that year world seems little by little to be at the University of Virginia. With catching up to the purposeful, “Fondly Do We Hope...” he wanted matter-of-fact diversity that has long to make something more concretely characterized the company (though about Lincoln without falling into such integration is still scarce in biopic territory, a piece that would the dance world). These days those serve as both a monument to Lincoln’s people who recognize his name are as legacy and a personal statement by Mr. likely to associate it with the image Jones. of him dancing down the aisles at the “Bill was always a storyteller,” 2007 Tonys after winning his award Ms. Wong said. “He has his heart on for “Spring Awakening.” It doesn’t his sleeve.” get more mainstream than that for Throughout the making of “Fondly American dance, yet he still sparks Do We Hope ...” Mr. Jones struggled strong reactions. with the question of audience: for “I think it’s the residue of the whom is he creating this work, which culture wars, and people who needed RUSSELL JENKINS/RAVINIA FESTIVAL bears the added responsibility of being a poster boy, they got one,” Mr. Jones a commission? said. He marveled that some people absolutely silent, just transfixed,” he “I’ve been looking at Tyler Perry,” still believe they can keep art walled said. “To see it up on its feet is more he said last month, referring to the off from politics. “Well, come on, overwhelming than I thought it would popular black filmmaker. “I envy him. they’re not separate anymore. I didn’t be.” He understands very clearly who his let that genie out of the bottle.” Mr. Jones and his collaborators audience is.” Mr. Kauffman spoke of needing could relate to the overwhelming Like many artists who, as he put it, an artist who would complicate “the part. The residency had been mentally refused “the orthodoxy of what a black saccharine part” of “Father Abraham” draining and physically demanding, artist is,” Mr. Jones has sometimes felt and drew a comparison between Mr. with cold weather making the long caught in limbo between his roots and Jones and Leonard Bernstein: “He days and nights of rehearsal in the his ambitions. was always called a fake. But boy, do open-air Pavilion theater a painful “I suppose maybe I could use ‘great we miss him today — the derring-do, test of endurance. The performers music’ and make well-constructed the controversy.” congregated around heaters while dance visualizations of it,” he said. Yet the idea of Father Abraham, not onstage. Everyone else huddled “And that will be satisfying to many greeted as a conquering hero by freed under blankets and as many layers of people. But it’s not the way I want slaves in Richmond, Va., is profoundly dance. I want dance to be scragglier moving for Mr. Jones, even as he RUSSELL JENKINS/RAVINIA FESTIVAL than that. I want to participate in the acknowledges its sentimentality. Bill T. Jones, center at top, rehearsing with his world of ideas.” And during the company’s residency company in New York; clothing as they could find. Emotions In May, during a visit to the at Ravinia this May, when Mr. below that, the dancers ran high, and as the amount of work Chicago History Museum, Mr. Jones Kauffman got his first real look (clockwise from left) still to be done seemed to increase, Mr. was mostly quiet walking around the Antonio Brown, Erick at an early draft of “Fondly Do Jones’s demeanor grew testy at times. various Lincoln artifacts. At one point We Hope ...” at a showing for Montes and LaMichael He barked commands and stalked up Leonard working on the he spent several minutes staring at a local schoolchildren, his initial Lincoln Piece in Illinois. aisles, and his words were not always bust of the man he has spent the past stir-the-pot motivation had Above, Mr.. Jones doing kind. two years with. At another he put his given way to emotions that research at the Chicago “He has a way of pushing you,” foot in a cast of Lincoln’s foot, based History Museum, and left him close to tears. said Paul Matteson, the dancer given on one of the president’s moccasins. It “I was sitting with below, in 1983 with his the hefty task of portraying Lincoln. partner, Arnie Zane. fit pretty well. a bunch of rowdy “He does it with the younger dancers, “This is a commission, and it’s a guys, and at a getting them to do something that’s bicentennial piece,” he had said the certain moment more than they know. It sometimes day before, ticking off a list of famous they went feels a little dangerous or cutting or choreographers Ravinia could have asked. ONLINE: MORE BILL T. JONES Then he had paused, as if to emphasize his next words, or let them Related articles, news and reviews: sink in. “They asked me.” nytimes.com/dance

TOM CARAVAGLIA

Jones peaks with 'Hope' September 19, 2009 BY HEDY WEISS Dance Critic/[email protected]

At once haunted and haunting, "Fondly Do We Hope ... Fervently Do We Pray" -- Bill T. Jones' epic 90-minute meditation on the life and legacy of Abraham Lincoln, and on the enduring issues of war and race -- is the work of a mature artist at the peak of his powers. I confess I've sometimes thought of Jones as something of a charlatan -- more seductive in his talk than in the work he produced. But here, in a seamless and consistently breathtaking collage of language, movement, music, light, imagery, meaning and emotion, he has created a thing of immense beauty and consequence.

And its world premiere at the Ravinia Festival on Thursday, the start of a national tour, is a momentous achievement both for the army of artists engaged in its realization and for Ravinia, which commissioned the piece in honor of the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth. It begins with an explosion -- signifying the start of the Civil War, perhaps, or the assassination of the 16th president -- followed by the mournful sound of Lincoln's funeral train. But this is no literal documentary. It is a fiercely poetic evocation of all things black, white and decidedly gray, and it just happened to have arrived onstage a day after this country once again was plunged into a heated debate about race, politics and rage.

Not by chance are there ghostly figures here --shadowy, animated reversals of color, including an iconic figure in a stovepipe hat and another man in a pork pie hat much like the one Jones wears. And not by chance does a magisterial black man, actor Jamyl Dobson, appear as the most recognizable Lincoln in the piece, signifying the way Jones (whose superb company of dancers is broadly multiracial) has upended many aspects of the discussion here.

The layers of complexity are too many and too intricately woven to detail in full. Suffice it to say that Lincoln's words, Walt Whitman's poetry, Jones' sly musings and traditional songs are all woven into a stunningly original score by virtuosos Jerome Begin, George Lewis Jr., and Christopher Antonio Willian Lancaster (aided by vocalist Clarissa Sinceno).

Bjorn Amelan's inspired set consists of a "white house" shaped by gauzy curtains, with a series of sleek white classical columns suggesting both the Lincoln Memorial and a slave market auction block, and finally forming the eerie halls through which a half-mad Mary Todd Lincoln (the wonderfully intense Asli Bulbul) wanders, while the tiny, expressive dancer I-Ling Liu moves through a Martha Graham-like solo suggesting Mary's agony.

Jennifer Nugent, Shayla-Vie Jenkins, Paul Matteson, Antonio Brown, Peter Chamberlin, Talli Jackson, LaMichael Leonard Jr. and Erick Montes are the ever-morphing characters in this piece, which was created in collaboration with Janet Wong (whose video design is extraordinary, and worked particularly well at Ravinia, where this season's newly installed screens were deployed to maximum effect). They have built a most united artistic house.

Jeudi 9 septembre 2010

“Fondly Do We Hope…Fervently Do We Pray”, un spectacle épuré visuellement. RUSSEL JENKINS

Les vies de Bill T. Jones

New York Envoyée special Reportage Tête chercheuse, le chorégraphe noir américain se laisse surprendre par l’“entertainment” Le millésime 2010 est celui de Bill T. Jones. En plein mois de juillet, alors que les grandes compagnies de danse comme le New York City Ballet ou l'Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater sont " off " jusqu'en septembre, le chorégraphe noir américain,pantalon vert et tee-shirt blanc, travaille. Au Rose Theater de New York, il présente sa nouvelle pièce, Fondly Do We Hope...Fervently Do We Pray (Tendrement nous espérons... Ardemment nous prions), inspirée par la vie d'Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), président des Etats-Unis dont le nom est associé à la guerre de Sécession et à l'abolition de l'esclavage.

A la fin de la représentation, Bill T. Jones descend une dizaine de " blocks " sur Broadway, pour aller saluer les danseurs et chanteurs de son spectacle Fela. Trois Tony Awards, dont un pour sa mise en scène, des critiques dithyrambiques dans les médias: toute la scène new-yorkaise, du producteur hip-hop Jay-Z jusqu'au comédien Will Smith, ovationne le chorégraphe pour cette comédie musicale, hommage au musicien nigérian Fela Anikulapo Kuti (1938-1997) (Le Monde du 14 août). Bill T. Jones rayonne. A 58 ans, une nouvelle vie commence. Chorégraphe contemporain, "avant-garde" selon sa proper définition, le voilà plébiscité par le grand public. " Il y a dix ans, ce type de show m'aurait déplu, admet-il. Aujourd'hui, j'adore. Je suis heureux de voir ces spectateurs qui ne me connaissaient pas découvrir mon travail et avoir du plaisir. Je crois avoir retrouvé le sens de ce que j'étais profondément.” Bill T. Jones rayonne. Bill T. Jones s'agace. C'est comme ça depuis toujours. Aussi rapide à prendre la mouche - colère memorable contre les spectateurs qui n'appréciaient pas son spectacle sur Jacques Brel au Festival d'Avignon en 1996 - qu'à vous serrer dans ses bras. Il refuse d'évoquer le passé, celui des années 1990 et de la lutte contre le sida. Pourtant, il s'est longtemps présenté comme " noir, homosexuel, séropositif " pour affronter les tabous. Avec Arnie Zane, son compagnon, rencontré en 1971, il fonde une compagnie. Zane meurt du sida en 1988. " J'ai parlé du sida parce qu'on me le demandait. On m'a enfermé là-dedans. Une pièce comme Still Here (1994), conçue avec des malades en phase terminale, ne parle pas de ça, elle évoque la vie et la mort. Je me revendique toujours comme un "artiste engagé", mais cela prend un autre ton aujourd'hui. Il faut advancer.” Fela et Abraham Lincoln sont donc les héros du moment. Il est passionnant de télescoper les destins du " black president " de Lagos, comme s'était baptisé Fela, qui dénonça au début des années 1960 la corruption du régime au Nigeria et le destin chahuté de Lincoln. Entre texte virulent, musique live puissante et danse sculpturale, Jones évoque le premier président des Etats- Unis antiesclavagiste, qui mourut assassiné. Danse-manifeste, théâtre d'idées, comme le revendique Jones.

Identité afro-américaine L'histoire des Noirs américains est une musique que Bill T. Jones connaît (il est un fabuleux interprète de gospel). Toutes les vies du chorégraphe composent une saga de l'identité afro-américaine, depuis sa naissance dans une famille d'ouvriers agricoles de douze enfants jusqu'à son succès avec Fela. L'une de ses ancêtres, Matt Lee, était " guérisseuse, née d'une famille d'esclaves dans les années 1860 ", comme il le raconte dans sa biographie, Dernière nuit sur Terre (Ed. Actes Sud). Estelle, la mère, a eu douze enfants avec deux maris différents. Elle sera sur le plateau auprès de son fils pour Last Supper at the Uncle's Tom Cabin (1990), harangue sur l'esclavage, le racisme, la religion et les valeurs démocratiques de l'Amérique. Le père de Bill T . , Gus Jones, émigra de la Floride au nord des Etats-Unis pour tenir une petite entreprise d'ouvriers itinérants. Enfant, Bill T. Jones travailla dans les champs. Quelques années plus tard, en 1971, il intègre l'université, s'inscrit en section athlétisme et découvre les cours de théâtre. Puis la danse. Il avale tout : le classique, le contemporain, la danse moderne et le style afro-caribéen. Ce qui explique son style si particulier, fusion de pas classiques, d'envolées jazz, auréolée d'une élégance très swing. Bill T. Jones affirme plus que jamais son désir d'un théâtre total. Sa compagnie rassemble des danseurs, des musiciens et des acteurs. Cette année, pour la première fois de sa carrière, les comptes financiers sont au beau fixe. " C'est incroyable en période de crise mais formidable, souligne-t-il. Je rêve d'installer la compagnie dans un studio à elle dans Harlem. Je réfléchis aussi sur la meilleure manière de poursuivre ce travail de comédie musicale, tout en maintenant une recherche plus pointue. Créer une sorte de troupe-laboratoire, pourquoi pas ? " Encore une nouvelle vie pour Bill T. Jones.

Bill T. Jones dances in a fascinating ‘American Masters’ DAVID HINCKLEY Thursday, November 10, 2011

You could say that choreographer Bill T. Jones crafting a tribute to Abraham Lincoln is a good man honoring a good man. You could also say it adds up to a good TV show. That’s more of a feat than it might sound in the new “American Masters” production called “Bill T. Jones,” which debuts Friday night at 9. The potential glitch is that Jones, a two-time Tony winner and Kennedy Center honoree, works in an avant-garde area of modern dance. That means his work is a little less accessible to civilians than, say, tap dancing or fox trots. If you’re not on his wavelength, a lot of his dances and choreography won’t by themselves, frankly, make much sense. This point is reinforced by a scene in which he is talking with his composer, the man who will write the music that accompanies Jones’ dance/theater work. To explain what he wants, Jones says, “He. They. Us. He. They. Us.” You can see where, outside his creative circle, that might not seem to explain exactly what he wants. Somehow, though, it doesn’t matter. We may not understand each note or each move, but watching Jones at work becomes fascinating. As we see him working to create the Lincoln piece, titled “Fondly Do We Hope. ... Fervently Do We Pray,” he explains where he wants each piece of the tribute to fit. In a broader sense, watching Jones work isn’t completely different from watching a carpenter build a house or watching a chef bake a cake. Appreciating the process doesn’t require understanding all the architecture. When Jones and a dancer clash over the scope of her role, and he patiently explains that her part will be more powerful if she remains more passive and quiet, anyone who has ever held a job will understand how both sides feel. Jones also explains how he came to the Lincoln piece, which was commissioned for the 200th anniversary by the Ravinia Festival. That’s held in Illinois, though much of the footage for the TV production was shot at rehearsals on 42nd St. Lincoln was a boyhood hero, says Jones, and the power of his actions, notably emancipation, continues to overshadow what Jones later learns about Lincoln’s less-remembered comments on the inherent inferiority of the black race. The Lincoln who emerges in “Fondly,” then, also has feet of clay and deep conflicts. Accordingly, Jones says during auditions for the Lincoln role that he wants “a man, not a boy ... someone who knows something of Lincoln’s sorrow.” Jones burns with intensity, and that also helps turn this into far more than a documentary about a modern- dance casting call. The viewer doesn’t have to fall in love with this work, which debuted at Ravinia in 2009, to come away thinking the title of this production is correct. Bill T. Jones does seem to be a good man.

December 11, 2011|By Irene Lacher, Special to the Los Angeles Times

The Sunday Conversation: With Bill T. Jones Choreographer Bill T. Jones, who won a Tony Award for 'Fela!,' discusses his influences, West African dance and diverse theater audiences.

Bill T. Jones won his second Tony Award for choreographing "Fela!," a musical about the late Nigerian Afrobeat singer, composer and political activist Fela Anikulapo Kuti. Jones, 59, also cowrote the book and directed the high-energy show about the government's crackdown on his commune. "Fela!" comes to the Ahmanson Theatre on Tuesday and runs through Jan. 22, 2012.

Were you familiar with Fela's music before this project? Yes, I was. Fela was very important to a lot of us in the '70s, maybe not as important as Bob Marley. I studied African dancing at the university in 1970, '71, and I was doing West African and African-Caribbean dance and modern dance taught by a wonderful dancer, Percival Borde, who was married to the great dancer and historian, Pearl Primus. It was all folklorico, so when I heard Fela's music, it was a revelation that this was African music. We were listening and improvising to some of his albums, but it wasn't until soon to be 10 years ago that [producer] Stephen Hendel came to me through a mutual friend and asked if I would consider doing the show. Then I began to go deeper into his music again.

Why do you call him "a sacred monster"? Because he is so flawed. There's something megalomaniacal about him. But he makes art as not only something you consume and have a good time with, but art that has aspirations of speaking to power and art that speaks for people who can't speak for themselves. There's something very inspirational in his music, and I think that makes him sacred.

Music with political purpose was more common in those days. Do you agree? I think at any one time there are always socially engaged artists. Some are more expressive than others. Some are caught in the cross hairs of history like Fela was, and he takes on a big responsibility and that's why he was arrested so many times, and that's why he was so often vilified and pursued by the authorities. You have to realize that very few rock musicians go so far as to teach themselves as Fela did another language. He had to learn to speak pidgin English. He had to learn to speak to the people in the street that he wanted to make music for. Therefore that gave him considerable credibility and to this day, in Nigeria, he's kind of a national hero.

Why wasn't his music better known here before this show? I'm not a musicologist, but people involved in the world music movement in the '80s knew about Fela. Fela did not see himself as a pop musician. He saw himself as a serious composer and his first love was jazz. Already that's going to be a problem for the masses of people in pop music. It was the kind of music that would appeal to people who know something about jazz music, who know something about modern music.

And I think there was something about his politics that was alien to Americans. They didn't know much about the post-colonial struggle in Africa. I don't believe that the majority of Americans were very interested. I think all those things make his music urgent, when you understand how he was already critiquing globalization, specifically what was the last gasp of colonialism in Africa and trying to speak first and foremost to people in Africa about it. The rest of us heard dance music only.

And one of the things we had to do in our show was to make the music accessible, we had to choose the right songs. And we had to translate the lyrics in some regards and sometimes write new lyrics that would express these very colloquial phrases he was using in the original.

One critic said "the pelvis is the star of West African dance." Can you explain that? That's true to a point. The whole body is played like a percussion instrument in African dance. We were inspired by the way Fela's women moved when you see them in videotapes. They've taken folkloric movements and done their gloss on them. There's a particular kind of spiraling movement in the pelvis that the women dancers do on Fela's stage ad nauseum. It's very provocative and very elegant at the same time. It's a sort of rippling, spiraling movement that goes down and goes up and goes down and goes up completely in sync with the music. On our stage, it's impressed a lot of people when they see them moving in this way and it's not designed to be hootchy-kootchy. Yes, they are fertility goddesses and yes, they're go-go dancers. But by the same token in the same Afrika Shrine [where Kuti performed], they did a Yoruba ceremony on certain nights of the week, complete with sacrificing a chicken.

How do you translate vernacular dance into theater? On our stage I introduced men. The only man onstage [originally] was Fela; for the most part all the other dancers were women. This is not a folkloric concert. [Those styles] are blended with my aesthetic of modern dance, so this is very much a work of the imagination, an interpretation of Fela's concerts. The men bring a certain kind of brio and energy to it that you don't see in the women onstage.

Trailers available for viewing:

Story/Time http://vimeo.com/34467076

Play and Play: An evening of movement and music http://vimeo.com/28473964

Body Against Body http://vimeo.com/26695351

For booking information, please contact your IMG Artists booking representative:

US Representation Carnegie Hall Tower 152 W 57th Street, 5th Floor New York, NY 10019 (p) 212-994-3500 (f) 212-994-3550 [email protected] www.imgartists.com

European Representation Gillian Newson DanceArts UK, London Office (p) +44 20 7622 8549 (f) +44 77 6816 6381 [email protected] skype gilliannewson

Company Contact Jean Davidson, Executive Director Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company 219 W 19th Street New York, NY 10011 (p) 212-691-6500 ext.201 (f) 212-633-1974 [email protected] www.newyorklivearts.org

about us

New York Live Arts offers a robust framework in support of the nation’s dance and movement-based artists through new approaches to producing, presenting and educating.

We are expanding the cultural footprint for movement-based artists and performance. New York Live Arts is eager to participate in the artistic and social fabric of New York and the world beyond. Bill T. Jone– s, Executive Artistic Director

In service of its mission, New York Live Arts: • Presents a world-class season of diverse artists noteworthy for their conceptual rigor and formal experimentation. • Provides unparalleled support for the creation of new work to artists at all stages of their careers, with a particular focus on mid-career artists. • Offers audiences and students meaningful opportunities to engage with art, artists and one another.

New York Live Arts presents inspired artists, at all stages in their careers, offering audiences a bracingly provocative opportunity to engage with some of the most compelling ideas of our time. – Carla Peterson, Artistic Director

Signature programs include: • The Presenting Season supports the work of over 50 highly individual emerging, mid-career and established artists offering audiences access to works notable for their conceptual rigor, formal experimentation and active engagement with aesthetic, political and social concerns. • Resident Commissioned Artist receives a competitive salary, health benefits, a two- year creative residency and a commission for a new work to premiere at New York Live Arts, with possible tour support to follow. • DTW Commissioning Fund supports the creation of new work from some of the most forward-thinking artists working today. • Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company tours worldwide and has performed in over 200 cities in 40 countries on every major continent and is recognized as one of the most innovative and powerful forces in the modern dance world. • Fresh Tracks identifies six early career artists to receive comprehensive performance, mentorship and residency support. • Studio Series provides 100 hours of creative residency time, stipends, and work-in-process showings to emerging and mid-career artists. • Shared Practice workshops allow season artists to share their physical and creative practices and processes. • The Suitcase Fund connects a global network of artists to promote cultural exchange and discourse around performance-based practices. • Artist-led education and engagement programs develop socially aware citizens and artists capable of questioning deeply and making meaningful contributions to the field, society and world.

New York Live Arts Leadership Bill T. Jones, Executive Artistic Director Jean Davidson, Chief Executive Officer Carla Peterson, Artistic Director

219 W 19th Street, New York, NY 10011 | 212.691.6500 Photo: Ian Douglas newyorklivearts.org New York Live Arts was founded in 2011 by a merger of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and Dance Theater Workshop.

We respect the past and the 75 years of combined knowledge and expertise that New York Live Arts is founded on, and we are wild about the future. – Bill T. Jones

About Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company Over the past 30 years the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company has shaped the evolution of contemporary dance through the creation and performance of over 140 works. Founded as a multicultural dance company in 1982, the company was born of an 11-year artistic collaboration between Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane. Today, the company is recognized as one of the most innovative and powerful forces in the modern dance world. The company has performed its ever-enlarging repertoire worldwide in over 200 cities in 30 countries on every major continent. The repertory of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company is widely varied in its subject matter, visual imagery and stylistic approach to movement, voice and stagecraft and includes musically-driven works as well as works using a variety of texts. Some of its most celebrated creations are evening length works including Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land (1990, Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music); Still/Here (1994, Biennale de la Danse in Lyon, France); We Set Out Early… Visibility Was Poor (1996, Hancher Auditorium,Iowa City, IA); You Walk? (2000, European Capital of Culture 2000,Bolgna, Italy); Blind Date (2006, Peak Performances at Montclair State University); Chapel/Chapter (2006, Harlem Stage Gatehouse); and Fondly Do We Hope… Fervently Do We Pray (2009, Ravinia Festival, Highland Park, IL). The ongoing, site-specific, Another Evening was last performed in its seventh incarnation as Another Evening: Venice/Arsenale (2010, La Biennale di Venezia).

About Dance Theater Workshop Founded in 1965 Dance Theater Workshop was a stalwart supporter of over 2,500 artists and companies. Originally founded as an artist collective, the organization was one of the few organizations in New York that provided direct support to artists through commissions and performance fees, international research and travel subsidies, rehearsal space and rental subsidies and touring support. With a record of over 45 years of innovation and service, Dance Theater Workshop furthered the development of dance and performance through original programming that addressed the ever-shifting needs of artists and audience members alike. Among the hundreds of other visionaries who found an early artistic home at Dance Theater Workshop are artists such as Johanna Boyce, Ronald K. Brown, Donald Byrd, Ann Carlson, H.T. Chen, Tina Croll, David Dorfman, Molissa Fenley, Whoopi Goldberg, David Gordon, Bill Irwin, John Jasperse, Bill T. Jones, Keely Garfield, Ralph Lemon, Susan Marshall, Bebe Miller, Mark Morris, Michael Moschen, David Neumann, Tere O’Connor, Pepón Osorio, Annie B Parson and Paul Lazar, David Parsons, Stephen Petronio, Lenny Pickett, Susan Rethorst, Stephanie Skura, Merián Soto and Reggie Wilson.

219 W 19th Street, New York, NY 10011 | 212.691.6500 newyorklivearts.org