A Rite Story/Time Play and Play: an Evening of Movement and Music

Home , David Grubin, Kathleen Marshall, Kyle Abraham, Linda Ronstadt, Sahr Ngaujah, Twin (production team)

Photos: Paul B. Goode A Rite A dance-theater collaboration with Anne Bogart and SITI Company. Story/Time Bill T. Jones returns to the stage in a critically acclaimed 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 else to it.” – Jasper Johns Body Against Body Program Seminal duets from the 1970s and 80s. Analogy: A Trilogy Three narratives in search of equivalences. Premiering June 2015. 2014–2015 Season

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 Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane foreshadowed issues of identity, form and social commentary that would change the face of Dance Company American dance. The Company has performed worldwide in over 200 cities in 40 countries on Kyle Maude Director of Producing and Touring every major continent and is recognized as one of the most innovative and powerful forces in 219 W 19th Street the dance-theater world. New York, NY 10011 t: 212.691.6500 ex 262 A Rite f: 212.633.1974 “...a serious, intricate, multidirectional centennial tribute to a work of art whose spell it deepens.” [email protected] – The New York Times newyorklivearts.org /#/BTJAZDC

A Rite is the intriguing and powerful dance-theater collaboration between renowned artists Bill T. Jones, North American Representation Anne Bogart and their respective companies, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and SITI Company. An Opus 3 Artists impassioned scholar waxes poetic about the cyclical structure of Stravinsky’s work that, in turn, evokes questions 470 Park Avenue South about our place in space/time. A shell-shocked WWI veteran finds solace from his battle-scarred psyche in the 9th Floor North work’s opening chords while reeling under the relentless assault of The Augurs’ bombastic percussion. A Rite New York, NY 10016 seamlessly joins minds, bodies and voices for a dance-theater reflection on Stravinsky’s groundbreaking score. t: 212.584.7500 Commissioned by Carolina Performing Arts at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with additional commissioning [email protected] support provided by the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College. opus3artists.com

European Representation Story/Time Gillian Newson “Modern yet wry, gorgeously danced and at times discordant...a dance-theater roller coaster with surprises Dance Arts UK/MSM Ltd around every corner.” – San Francisco Chronicle t: +44 207 622 8549 m: + 44 776 816 6381 Director and choreographer Bill T. Jones – whose major honors include a MacArthur “Genius” Award, the [email protected] Kennedy Center Honors and two Tony Awards for Best Choreography – returns to the stage at the center of a skype: gilliannnewson 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.

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

The Body Against Body Program is an intimate and focused collection of duet works drawn from the Company’s 30 year history. Bill T. Jones returns to his 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 post modern 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 a widely acclaimed choreographer.

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

Analogy: A Trilogy This trilogy brings into light the different types of war we fight, and in particular, the war within ourselves. Analogy: A Trilogy searches for the connection between three varying stories; focusing on memory and the effect of powerful events on the actions of individuals and, more importantly, on their often unexpressed inner life. Jones continues his exploration of how text, storytelling and movement pull and push against each other and how another experience can be had through the combination and recombination of these elements.

Analogy: A Trilogy, Part One: Dora Tramontane will premiere on June 18, 2015 as part of the Peak Performances at Montclair State University. Photos: Paul B. Goode Body Against Body Program

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

“Bill T. Jones unadorned is a revelation.” The Boston Globe Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company The Body Against Body Program is an intimate and focused collection of duet works drawn Kyle Maude from the Company’s 30 year history. Bill T. Jones returns to his roots in the avant-garde with Director of Producing and Touring a program that revives and reconsiders the challenging, groundbreaking works that launched 219 W 19th St. Jones and the late Arnie Zane, his partner and collaborator of 17 years. Still some of the most New York, NY 10011 significant examples of the postmodern aesthetic, these pieces redefined the duet form and t: 212. 691. 6500 x262 changed the face of American dance. Both conceptually and physically rigorous, the works take f: 212. 633. 1974 on new life through the diverse dancers of Jones’s company, providing a rare look at the origins [email protected] of a widely acclaimed choreographer. newyorklivearts.org/#/BTJAZDC

Programs include 2-3 works from the Company’s repertory: North American Representation Opus 3 Artists Blauvelt Mountain (A Fiction) (1980, reconstructed 2002) 470 Park Avenue South One of the first duets that Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane created together, Blauvelt Mountain capitalizes on the 9th Floor North disparities and specificities between distinct body types, often placing one person in a position of dependency. New York, NY 10016 Eccentric and occasionally humorous tableaux, casual conversations, and word associations are paired with t: 212.584.7500 rigorous partnering sequences to suggest the mental and emotional engagement, heightened awareness, [email protected] and intimacy necessary for successful partnering. opus3artists.com Video: vimeo.com/26696698 password: btjaz

Duet x 2 (1982, reconstructed 2003) European Representation The virtuosity of Duet x 2 is rooted in conventional modern dance vocabulary and marked by demanding Gillian Newson athletics, surprising shapes and changing relationships. The work underlines the power and emotion that is Dance Arts UK/MSM Ltd experienced when two bodies walk, stand, support and crash through space at full throttle. t: +44 207 622 8549 Video: vimeo.com/50232543 password: btjaz m: + 44 776 816 6381 [email protected] Monkey Run Road (1979, reconstructed 2011) skype: gilliannnewson 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. Video: vimeo.com/26697124 password: btjaz

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. Video: vimeo.com/35014669 password: btjaz

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. Video: vimeo.com/84739595 password: btjaz

Shared Distance (1982, reconstructed 2014) Created concurrently with the trilogy of defining duets made and performed by Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane: Monkey Run Road, Blauvelt Mountain and Valley Cottage. Originally made for Bill T. Jones and Julie West, this duet plays on the masculine and feminine and the reversal of these gender-specific roles. Video: vimeo.com/95913699 password: btjaz

Just You (1993, reconstructed 2014) Originally titled It Takes Two, Just You was created by Bill T. Jones in 1989 for the duet company of Steven Koester and Terry Creach, who were craving something informed by these pivotal duets between Jones and Zane. The work was revived in 1993 for the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, where the name changed to Just You. Here the original idiosyncratic, formalist concerns were placed at the service of a more theatrical, poetic purpose, made all the more poignant by its being danced to the delicious interpretation of standards by Ray Charles and Betty Carter. Video: vimeo.com/95904105 password: btjaz

Body Against Body was commissioned by The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. 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 Play and Play: An Evening of Movement and Music Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company “Rarely has one seen a dance company throw itself onto the stage with such Kyle Maude kinetic exaltation.” – The New York Times Director of Producing and Touring 219 W 19th St. Performed with live musicians,* Play and Play: An Evening of Movement and Music applies New York, NY 10011 t: 212. 691. 6500 x262 Jones’s inventive choreography to some of the most important Western musical works of our f: 212. 633. 1974 time. Featuring compositions by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Ravel or Schubert this [email protected] program highlights the joy of musicians and dancers working together. newyorklivearts.org/#/BTJAZDC

Program A North American Representation Opus 3 Artists D-Man in the Waters (1989) 470 Park Avenue South “In a dream you saw a way to survive and you were full of joy.”- Jenny Holzer 9th Floor North New York, NY 10016 Bill T Jones’s joyful tour-de-force, D-Man in the Waters, is a true classic of modern dance and a two time t: 212.584.7500 New York Dance and Performance (“Bessie”) Award-winning work. It is a celebration of life and the resiliency of [email protected] the human spirit that guides audiences through loss, hope and triumph. Set to Mendelssohn’s Octet for Strings opus3artists.com in E-flat Major, Op. 20 the work is one of the finest examples of the post-modern aesthetic and was featured in PBS’s landmark film Dancing in the Light – Six Dances by African-American Choreographers. European Representation Video: vimeo.com/27773181 password: btjaz Gillian Newson Dance Arts UK/MSM Ltd Spent Days Out Yonder (2000) t: +44 207 622 8549 Spent Days Out Yonder is a pure musical exploration, rare in the Bill T. Jones canon, set to the second movement m: + 44 776 816 6381 of Mozart’s String Quartet No. 23 in F Major. The movement is firmly rooted in Mr. Jones’s elegant, weighted [email protected] movement vocabulary, challenging dancers to move with ease, efficiency and physical honesty through the skype: gilliannnewson sublime score. Video: vimeo.com/27774023 password: btjaz

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. Can be performed with or without nudity. Video: vimeo.com/36301879 password: CRNYLA2011 * Requires local string octet at each engagement

Program B

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. Video: (Ravel and Story/): vimeo.com/68562220 password: btjaz

Story/ (2013) Story/ is the latest result of the company’s continued investigation in using John Cage’s Indeterminacy as a choreographic tool. Following the model for the acclaimed Story/Time, the work employs a random menu of movement that is accompanied by Franz Schubert’s String Quartet No. 14 (Death and the Maiden) to craft a conversation between the music and the movement. Video: (Ravel and Story/): vimeo.com/68562220 password: btjaz * Requires local string quartet at each engagement

Reconstruction support for D-Man in the Waters provided by the American Dance Festival. Photos: Paul B. Goode

A Rite

“…a serious, intricate, multidirectional centennial tribute to a work of art whose spell it deepens.” – The New York Times

Award winning directors Bill T. Jones and Anne Bogart collaborate to create a major dance-theater work coinciding with the 100th Anniversary of the premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. A Rite (2013)

“Like many immersed in dance, I’ve seen a number of works set to Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Stravinsky’s score... [t]his is the first new one to pull me into the music and Dance Company it’s history in so many unexpected and provocative ways.” – artsjournal.com Kyle Maude Director of Producing and Touring 219 W 19th Street In this celebration of milestones, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and SITI Company New York, NY 10011 celebrate their combined 50 years of artistic achievements with the centennial of Igor Stravinsky’s t: 212.691.6500 ex 262 The Rite of Spring. f: 212.633.1974 [email protected] In A Rite, dancers and actors alike burst onto to the stage feet stomping, knees quivering – a newyorklivearts.org /#/BTJAZDC complex and knowing homage to Nijinsky’s original “Sacrificial Maiden” choreographic motif - to North American Representation the beat of drums and the strum of strings in Stravinsky’s composition that energized and shocked Opus 3 Artists audiences 100 years ago at its premiere in Paris. Since then, The Rite of Spring has taken on 470 Park Avenue South legendary status as a symbol of artistic insurrection and a cornerstone of the avant-garde. 9th Floor North New York, NY 10016 In this work of dance-theater, the influence of chorales, Lithuanian folk-tunes and jazz on t: 212.584.7500 Stravinsky’s music is revealed. An impassioned scholar waxes poetic about the cyclical structure of [email protected] Stravinsky’s work that, in turn, evokes questions about our place in space/time. A shell-shocked WWI opus3artists.com veteran finds solace from his battle-scarred psyche in the work’s opening chords while reeling under European Representation the relentless assault of The Augurs’ bombastic percussion. Each of us is implicated in his crisis. Gillian Newson DanceArts UK/MSM Ltd A Rite is an intriguing and powerful collaboration between artists Bill T. Jones, Anne Bogart and t: +44 20 7622 8549 their companies joining minds, bodies, and voices to offer a fête of Stravinsky’s incendiary work and m: +44 77 6816 6381 its cultural resonance. [email protected] skype: gilliannewson A Rite was commissioned by Carolina Performing Arts at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. SITI Company Representation Additional commissioning support provided by the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College. Rena Shagan Associates, Inc 16 W 88th St # A A Rite was funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. New York, NY 10024 t: 212.873.9700 Video: vimeo.com/83785475 shaganarts.com password: ARite 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 takes to the stage in a critically acclaimed new work of storytelling and dance. Story/Time (2012)

“These memories…are poignant, hilarious and sometimes terrifying.” Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company –The Star-Ledger Kyle Maude Director of Producing and Touring 219 W 19th St. “All his endeavors…go back to the questions about love, history and New York, NY 10011 identity.” – The New York Times t: 212. 691. 6500 x262 f: 212. 633. 1974 Director and choreographer Bill T. Jones – whose major honors include a MacArthur “Genius” Award, [email protected] the Kennedy Center Honors and two Tony Awards for Best Choreography – returns to the stage at newyorklivearts.org/#/BTJAZDC the center of an acclaimed new work for his renowned company. Inspired by legendary artist and North American Representation composer John Cage’s Indeterminacy, a performance of ninety one-minute stories interrupted by a Opus 3 Artists chance musical score, Jones creates a collage of dance, music, and seventy of his own short stories, 470 Park Avenue South arranged anew for each performance by chance procedure. 9th Floor North New York, NY 10016 In Story/Time, Jones fuses the age-old art of storytelling with a vibrant landscape of contemporary t: 212.584.7500 movement and music. Similar to a busy streetscape or a crowded room, the experience challenges [email protected] audience members to find meaning and connection in the sweep of randomized, disparate elements. opus3artists.com Jones’ short stories are drawn from his own life and tales handed down through the generations of European Representation his family. In layering a traditional form against the avant-garde compositional concerns of the mid- Gillian Newson century modernists, the tension between high and low art is called in to question. Dance Arts UK/MSM Ltd t: +44 207 622 8549 In his first project with the Company, composer, musician, and intermedia artist Ted Coffey, Ph.D. m: + 44 776 816 6381 composes and performs a new acoustic and electronic score that draws upon chance procedure and [email protected] interactive technologies. In Open Space, Newton Armstrong describes Coffey’s music as “subtle, skype: gilliannnewson 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.”

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.

Video: vimeo.com/38237079 password: btjaz Analogy: A Trilogy Part One, Dora: Tramontane World Premiere June 2015 Analogy: A Trilogy

“Memory, often strikes me as a kind of dumbness. It makes one’s head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down on the earth from a great height, from one Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds.” –W.G.Sebald Dance Company Kyle Maude Bill T. Jones with Associate Artistic Director, Janet Wong, and his company are developing three new evening- Director of Producing and Touring length works titled, Analogy: A Trilogy. This trilogy brings into light the different types of war we fight and, 219 W 19th St. in particular, the war within ourselves. Analogy: A Trilogy searches for the connection between three varying New York, NY 10011 stories; focusing on memory and the effect of powerful events on the actions of individuals and, more t: 212. 691. 6500 x262 importantly, on their often unexpressed inner life. Jones continues his exploration of how text, storytelling and f: 212. 633. 1974 movement pull and push against each other and how another experience can be had through the combination [email protected] and recombination of these elements. newyorklivearts.org/#/BTJAZDC

Jones’ present preoccupation is with the development of his company into an ensemble that not only dances North American Representation beautifully, but also sings and speaks. Members of the company will deliver texts from all narratives. Opus 3 Artists 470 Park Avenue South Jones first began his exploration of Analogy through reading W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants. Inspired by the 9th Floor North novelistic creation, he wanted something to compare to the character Ambros Adelwarth from the individuals New York, NY 10016 around Jones himself. He began an oral history with Dora Amelan. Originally intended as a gift to her sons t: 212.584.7500 to capture their mother’s memory, he became fascinated not only with Dora’s story, but with her character. [email protected] As Jones began development on Analogy, based on Dora’s stories, he felt that she needed a more percussive opus3artists.com counterpoint. He began a conversation with his nephew, Lance, a young African-American man in the middle of his life with an uncertain future. All three stories, while wildly different ruminate on the nature of service, duty and the question of what is a life well lived. European Representation Gillian Newson Composer Nick Hallett is creating original music informed by the text as well as a soundscape that combines Dance Arts UK/MSM Ltd German Romantic Lieder, songs from both world wars, the 50s and 60s classic pop music and the club music t: +44 207 622 8549 from the 80s and 90s. Hallett, pianist Emily Manzo, a baritone (to be cast) and the ensemble will perform the m: + 44 776 816 6381 music live. [email protected] - Décor by Creative Director, Bjorn Amelan with Video Design by Janet Wong. - - - Lighting design by long-term skype: gilliannnewson collaborator Robert Wierzel - Costumes by Liz Prince.

Analogy: Part One, Dora: Tramontane will premiere on June 18, 2015 as part of the Peak Performances Series at Montclair State University.

Part One, Dora: Tramontane tra-mon-tane adjective \trə-ˈmän-ˌtān, ˌtra-mən-ˈ\ 1. traveling to, situated on, or living on the other side of a mountains; latin transmontanus “beyond the mountains”

Part One is based on an oral history Jones conducted with 94-year old Dora Amelan, a French Jewish nurse & social worker. Amelan’s harrowing, touching and inspirational story is broken into approximately 30 episodes that become the basis for choreography and songs. These episodes chronicle her early life in Belgium, her mother’s death as the Germans were marching into Belgium and her experiences working at an underground Jewish organization in Vichy France’s internment camps, Gurs & Rivesaltes. Here is a portrait of the ability to persevere and survive.

Part Two, Lance: Bad Boy In Part Two, we meet Lance, whose battles with his own personal demons-drugs and excess- exposes us to another type of war. It was the battlefield of the nightlife and underworld of the late 80s and early 90s club culture and sex trade. This “pretty boy-gangster thug”, a name he acquired in prison, holds steadfast to his often tragic and sometimes outrageously humorous narrative, while facing an uncertain future.

Part Three, Ambros Adelwarth: The Emigrant Part Three is Jones’ reaction to Ambros Adelwarth from W.G.Sebald’s celebrated historical novel, The Emigrants. This narrative, through a fictionalized history, strives to suggest how an experience of trauma can go underground in the psyche of an individual and direct consciously and unconsciously the course of that individual’s life. The central figure, Ambros Adelwarth, is a German valet/manservant who serves as companion to a privileged, dissipated, young scion of a wealthy Jewish family. This restrained and evocative narrative tracks Ambros’ experience working at hotels, the glamorous travels with his charge, Cosmo, through Europe and the Middle East on the eve of WWI and then his life after Cosmo’s death.

Company History

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 nine-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, 2001, 2013), 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 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.” 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 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

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 the 2013 National Medal of Arts to a 1994 MacArthur “Genius” Award and Kennedy Center Honors in 2010. Mr. Jones was honored with the 2014 Doris Duke Award, recognized as Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 2010, 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 Photo by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders 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. Mr. Jones is currently 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).

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.

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.

Arnie Zane Biography

Arnie Zane (1948-1988) (Co-Founder/Choreographer) was a native New Yorker born in the Bronx and educated at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Binghamton. In 1971, Mr. Zane and Bill T. Jones began their long collaboration in choreography and in 1973 formed the American Dance Asylum in Binghamton with Lois Welk. Mr. Zane’s first recognition in the arts came as a photographer when he received a Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) Fellowship in 1973. Mr. Zane was the recipient of a second CAPS Fellowship in 1981 for choreography, as well as two Choreographic Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1983 and 1984). In 1980, Mr. Zane was co- recipient, with Mr. Jones, of the German Critics Award for his work, Blauvelt Mountain. Rotary Action, a duet with Mr. Jones, was filmed for television, co-produced by WGBH-TV Boston and Channel 4 in London. Continuous Replay: The Photographs of Arnie Zane was published by MIT Press in April 1999.

Dancer Biographies

Antonio Brown, a native of Cleveland, Ohio, began his dance training at the Cleveland School of the Arts and received his B.F.A. from The Juilliard School in 2007 under the direction of Lawrence Rhodes. While there, he performed works by Ohad Naharin, Jose Limon, Jiri Kylian, Eliot Feld, Aszure Barton, Jessica Lang, Susan Marshall and Larry Keigwin, among others. Mr. Brown has also worked with Malcolm Low/Formal Structure, Stephen Pier, Nilas Martins Dance Company, Sidra Bell Dance New York and Camille A. Brown & Dancers. In addition to working with the company, Mr. Brown also performs with Gregory Dolbashian's "The Dash Ensemble" and has choreographed on Verb Ballets, August Wilson Center Dance Ensemble, Perry Mansfield Performing Arts School and Camp and various other companies, schools and intensives across the United States. Antonio’s work has also been shown at The Juilliard School, Center for Performance Research, NYC Summer Stage, Riverside Church and Hunter College. Mr. Brown joined the company in 2007 and is grateful to share his gifts and talents with the world.

Rena Butler is a native of Chicago, IL. She studied under the instruction of Anna Paskevska and Randy Duncan at The Chicago Academy for the Arts high school. Ms. Butler received her B.F.A from SUNY Purchase Conservatory of Dance, and also studied dance abroad at Taipei National University of the Arts in Taiwan. She graduated cum laude and was the recipient of the Bert Terborgh Dance Award. Ms. Butler has also danced for Kyle Abraham/Abraham.In.Motion, David Dorfman Dance, Luna Negra Dance Theater, Mettin Movement and salsa dance company Pasos Con Sabor. Ms. Butler is featured in Dance Magazine's March 2013 article 'On the Rise', FORMA collective magazine and online fashion and culture site, 'Refinery29'.

Cain Coleman, Jr. (Dancer) started his dance training in high school at The Center for The Arts at Henrico High. He later joined The City Dance Theatre of Richmond, VA. After training at the Conservatory of Dance at SUNY Purchase, he began dancing with Philadanco and The Martha Graham Dance Company. He has performed works by Paul Taylor, George Balanchine, Martha Graham, Talley Beaty, George Fazon, Christopher Huggins, Ray Mercer and many more. He has been seen on Good Morning America, Good Morning New York and So You Think you Can Dance. As an emerging choreographer he has presented works at Purchase College, Regional Dance

Association, The Girl Effect Project and Bare Bones Dance Project, and has produced a few of his own shows. Mr. Coleman joined the Company in 2014.

Talli Jackson was born and raised in Liberty, NY. He received his first training with Livia Vanaver at the Vanaver Caravan Dance Institute in upstate New York. He has been a recipient of full scholarships from the American Dance Festival in ‘06 and ’08, the Bates Dance Festival, and the Ailey School. Since moving to New York City in 2006, Mr. Jackson has had the pleasure of working with Francesca Harper, Paul Matteson and Erick Montes. In 2013, Mr. Jackson was honored with a Princess Grace Award in dance, and was nominated for a Clive Barnes Award. He has been a

member of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company since 2009.

Shayla-Vie Jenkins, originally from Ewing, NJ, received her primary dance instruction from Watson Johnson Dance Theater and Mercer County Performing Arts School. In 2004, she graduated with honors from the Ailey/Fordham B.F.A. program. She has performed with The Kevin Wynn Collection, Nathan Trice Rituals, Kazuko Hirabayashi, The Francesca Harper Project, Yaa Samar Dance Theater, and A Canary Torsi. In 2008, she was featured in Dance Magazine’s “On The Rise” performers. Ms. Jenkins joined the Company in 2005.

I-Ling Liu, a native of Taiwan, received her B.F.A. 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 as an apprentice in 2007 and became a member of the Company in 2008.

Erick Montes Chavero, originally from Mexico City, trained at the National School of Classical and Contemporary Dance. 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. In 2009, he was part of the program In the Company of Men at Dance New Amsterdam. He has been part of the River to River Festival in collaboration with DJ Spooky, The Boogie Down Dance Series at Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, and has been presenting his work in collaboration with the choreographers Bill Young and Colleen Thomas for the Gorillas-Fest and The LIT Festival, The Tank at DCTV, and E-Moves at The Gatehouse/Harlem Stage. 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. He has presented his choreography in Mexico, Colombia and Spain. Mr. Montes-Chavero joined the company in 2003.

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 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award 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 joined the company in the summer of 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 and toured nationally and internationally as a company member of David Dorfman Dance, Alexandra/Beller Dances, Bill Young/Colleen Thomas & Dancers, johannes weiland and Tania Isaac Dance. Ms. Riegel began working with the Company as a guest artist in 2010 and was ecstatic to join the Company in 2011.

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 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award 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 “Bessie” 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. Mr. Wierzel 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 Mr. Jones 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.

Nick Hallet (Analogy Composer) is a composer, cultural producer and vocalist. His opera collaboration with artist Shana Moulton, Whispering Pines 10, has been presented at The Kitchen, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, SFMOMA, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art's TBA Festival, The Warhol Museum and Carolina Performing Arts at UNC Chapel Hill, and is currently being adapted for the Internet. Since 2007, Hallett has served as the music director of the Joshua Light Show, a team of projection artists with roots in the psychedelic movement of the 1960s, which appears internationally, including fulldome presentations at the American Museum of Natural History's Hayden Planetarium and Mutek Mexico that feature Hallett's original soundscores. Hallett held the first Re:New Re:Play artist residency at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in May 2009, creating a four-part series focusing on the voice as artistic medium, and his work was featured in the 2007 and 2009 Performa Biennials. As a vocalist, Hallett has sung in operas by Anthony Braxton and Susie Ibarra, and has staged adventurous interpretations of music by Meredith Monk and Karlheinz Stockhausen. From 2000-2003, he led the band Plantains, generating a catalog of over 100 original songs, which continue to be reinterpreted by such cabaret artists as Justin Vivian Bond and Lady Rizo.

Contacts: Elizabeth Cooke Associate Director of Communications [email protected] (212) 691-6500 x210

Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company Announces 2014-2015 Season

Highlights include the New York City Premiere of Story/Time (35, 36, 37 & 38) at New York Live Arts; the World Premiere of Analogy: A Trilogy, Part One: Dora Tramontane in June 2015 at Montclair State University; and more

New York, NY, July 2, 2014 (updated November 10, 2014) – The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, New York Live Arts’ Resident Dance Company, announced today the touring programs and productions for the 2014-2015 Season. The Company will perform and conduct residencies in more than 11 cities in eight states over the next 12 months, making their debut at a number of venues across the U.S. Highlights of the 2014-2015 Season include the New York City premiere of Story/Time (35, 36, 37 & 38) November 4 – 8 and 11 – 15 on the Company’s home stage at the New York Live Arts theater; the world premiere of Analogy: A Trilogy, Part One: Dora Tramontane in June 2015 at Montclair State University; the Company debut at Dancers’ Workshop in Jackson Hole, Wyoming; and more. Touring programs for the 2014-2015 season include Analogy: A Trilogy, Part One: Dora Tramontane, the Company’s newest work; Story/Time; Play and Play: An Evening of Movement and Music; Body Against Body; and A Rite.

“Our 2014-2015 touring season represents the wide range of works—both new and restaged—that the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company’s repertory encompasses. What began more than 32 years ago as a shared vision between me and Arnie Zane has continued today with the help of Associate Artistic Director Janet Wong and our Creative Director Bjorn Amelan,” said Bill T. Jones, Artistic Director of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and New York Live Arts. “During the 2014-2015 Season I look forward to returning to the Live Arts stage to present the New York City premiere of Story/Time, as well as unveiling our newest work, Analogy: A Trilogy, Part One: Dora Tramontane, in June 2015 at Montclair State University, and continuing to expose an array of works to new audiences around the country.”

The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company kicks off their 2014-2015 Season in July with a number of residencies in conjunction with their newest creation, Analogy: A Trilogy, Part One: Dora Tramontane. From July 7 – 11 the Company will conduct a creative residency at Montclair State University, culminating with a work-in-progress showing on July 11 at 3:30pm. Next, the Company will make their debut at Dancers’ Workshop in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, with a creative residency from July 14 – 21. The Company’s time at Dancers’ Workshop will include an offering of master classes, open rehearsals with Q&A sessions, special events and a work-in-progress showing. The work, which will have its world premiere at Montclair State University in June 2015, is a hybrid of dance, theater and music, and takes its inspiration from both W.G. Sebald’s literature and an oral history Jones conducted with Dora Amelan, a 94 year-old French survivor of WWII. Using the character Ambros Adelwarth, from Sebald’s The Emigrants, Analogy: A Trilogy, Part One: Dora Tramontane explores two parallel streams of investigation in search of equivalences including identity, duty, love, the instinct for survival and more. Analogy: A Trilogy, Part One: Dora Tramontane is commissioned by Peak Performances @ Montclair State (NJ) and Co-commissioned by Dancers' Workshop in Jackson Hole, WY.

In November, the Company will return to their home stage at New York Live Arts’ theater with the New York City premiere of Story/Time (35, 36, 37 & 38). A critically acclaimed work of riveting storytelling and luscious movement called “a dance-theater roller coaster with surprises around every corner,” (San Francisco Chronicle), Story/Time takes its inspiration from the legendary composer and artist John Cage’s Indeterminacy. Featuring seventy one-minute stories interrupted by a chance musical score, the work weaves together a collage of movement, music and Jones’ own short stories, arranged anew for each performance. The performances at Live Arts will mark the Company’s second home season and will feature a selection of special guest artists.

Other highlights of the 2014-2015 Season include the presentation of Story/Time at Stanford University in January 2015 and the Los Angeles premiere of A Rite, which Alastair Macaulay of The New York Times called “…a serious, intricate, multidirectional centennial tribute to a work of art whose spell it deepens,” at UCLA in March 2015. Additionally, during the Company’s residency and performances of Play and Play: An Evening of Movement and Music at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, students will perform Continuous Replay with the Company, a work said to be “a thorough primer in Jones/Zane style: sharp versus flowing, large versus small, straight versus angled” by The New York Times.

In September 2014, Jones’ latest book, Story/Time: The Life of an Idea, will be released by Princeton University Press. Featuring a large-format design complete with revealing stories and richly illustrated with color photographs of Story/Time’s original stage production, the book reflects on Jones’ art and life, and describes the genesis of the work, which was inspired by modernist composer and performer John Cage. Resulting from Jones’ presentations at Princeton University for the Toni Morrison Lectures in 2012, the text includes a progression of 60 single-page narratives (hand-picked from his collection of almost 200 stories from Story/Time), presented in a random order similar to that of the live dance work. (Review copies are available upon request.)

EDUCATIONAL INITIATIVES

The Company will continue to expand its dynamic education program. The 2014-2015 academic year marks the Company’s sixth year in partnership with the Bard College Dance Program, where Company teaching artists and New York Live Arts guest artists teach an innovative curriculum designed to cultivate the next generation of dance-makers and creative thinkers. For the 2014-2015 academic year, Cox, Stuart Singer, Beth Gill and Cori Olinghouse will teach contemporary technique to beginning- through advanced-level dance students. Cox will share the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company's approach to movement, while former New York Live Arts commissioned artist Gill, former Studio Series artist Olinghouse, and Singer, a former Bill T. Jones/Arnie Dance Company member, who has also performed at Live Arts with numerous artists (including in Gill’s most recent work), will share their unique movement styles and practices. The Company will also complete a one-week residency at Bard this coming academic year. 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.

A major highlight of the 2014-2015 reconstruction projects is the licensing of Ravel: Landscape or Portrait? (movements 1 & 4) by New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Former Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company member Sean Curran (current Co-Chair of the Department of Dance at Tisch) was instrumental in bringing the work to NYU, marking the first licensing project for Ravel: Landscape or Portrait? Restaged by Janet Wong, Associate Artistic Director of the Company, along with current Company dancer Shayla-Vie Jenkins, the work will be set on the Second Avenue Dance Company, the resident student dance company of the Department of Dance at Tisch.

Another educational highlight of the 2014-2015 Season will be Jones’ participation in Shared Practice, one of Live Arts’ signature educational programs, where season artists share the physical and creative practices behind their work. Shared Practice workshops consist of a process-focused session, providing participants the opportunity to recharge their own artistry by experiencing different approaches to making and moving. In conjunction with the Company’s fall season at Live Arts, Jones will lead a Shared Practice workshop on Saturday, November 8, 2014, from 3pm – 6pm.

ABOUT THE BILL T. JONES/ARNIE ZANE DANCE COMPANY

Over the past 32 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. In 2011, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company merged with Dance Theater Workshop to form New York Live Arts, of which Bill T. Jones is the Artistic Director.

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); Fondly Do We Hope… Fervently Do We Pray (2009, Ravinia Festival, Highland Park, IL); Another Evening: Venice/Arsenale (2010, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy); Story/Time (2012, Peak Performances); and A Rite (2013, Carolina Performing Arts at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill). The Company is currently touring Play and Play: an evening of movement and music, two repertory programs featuring music-inspired works; Body Against Body, an intimate and focused collection of duet works drawn from the Company’s 32-year history; A Rite, a dance-theater collaboration with Anne Bogart and SITI Company and Story/Time, a work inspired by John Cage’s Indeterminacy.

The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company consists of dancers Antonio Brown, Rena Butler, Talli Jackson, Shayla-Vie Jenkins, LaMichael Leonard, Jr., I-Ling Liu, Erick Montes Chavero, Joseph Poulson and Jenna Riegel. Bjorn Amelan serves as the Creative Director for the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, and Janet Wong serves as Associate Artistic Director.

ABOUT BILL T. JONES

Bill T. Jones, Artistic Director of New York Live Arts and Artistic Director/Co-Founder of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, is a multi-talented artist, choreographer, dancer, theater director and writer who has received major honors ranging from the 2013 National Medal of Arts to a 1994 MacArthur “Genius” Award and Kennedy Center Honors in 2010. Mr. Jones was honored with the 2014 Doris Duke Award, recognized as Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 2010, 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 has been featured in numerous television, radio, film and documentary programs over the years. In 2013, Jones was profiled by PBS-affiliate Thirteen/NYC-ARTS and featured on NPR’s popular Talk of the Nation program and the acclaimed Made HERE documentary series. In recent years, he has also been profiled on NBC Nightly News, The Today Show and the Colbert Report. 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).

He has received honorary doctorates from Yale University, Art Institute of Chicago, Bard College, Columbia College, Skidmore College, the Juilliard School, Montclair State University, 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. Jones is currently editing the publication of the series of Toni Morrison Lectures he delivered at Princeton in 2012, which will be released by Princeton Press. 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.

ABOUT ARNIE ZANE

Arnie Zane (1948-1988) was a native New Yorker born in the Bronx and educated at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Binghamton. In 1971, Mr. Zane and Bill T. Jones began their long collaboration in choreography and in 1973 formed the American Dance Asylum in Binghamton with Lois Welk. Mr. Zane’s first recognition in the arts came as a photographer when he received a Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) Fellowship in 1973. Mr. Zane was the recipient of a second CAPS Fellowship in 1981 for choreography, as well as two Choreographic Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1983 and 1984). In 1980, Mr. Zane was co-recipient, with Mr. Jones, of the German Critics Award for his work, Blauvelt Mountain. Rotary Action, a duet with Mr. Jones, was filmed for television, co-produced by WGBH-TV Boston and Channel 4 in London. Continuous Replay: The Photographs of Arnie Zane was published by MIT Press in April 1999.

2014-2015 TOUR PROGRAMS

Analogy: A Trilogy (2015) is the Company’s newest creation. Bill T. Jones, with Associate Artistic Director Janet Wong and his company, are developing three new evening length works. This trilogy brings into light the different types of war we fight, and in particular, the war within ourselves. Analogy: A Trilogy searches for the connection between three varying stories; focusing on memory and the effect of powerful events on the actions of individuals and, more importantly, on their often unexpressed inner life. Jones continues his exploration of how text, storytelling and movement pull and push against each other and how another experience can be had through the combination and recombination of these elements. Part One: Dora Tramontane will premiere at Montclair State University in June 2015.

A Rite (2013) 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. A Rite utilizes the social-historical context of the score as a point of departure, reflecting on the human condition—sacrifice, creative and spiritual death, and the individual against or with the community. Called “a serious, intricate, multidirectional centennial tribute to a work of art whose spell it deepens” (The New York Times) A Rite was commissioned by Carolina Performing Arts at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with additional commissioning support provided by the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College.

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: An Evening of Movement and Music (2012) features a collection of works set to chamber music, including D-Man in the Waters, Spent Days Out Yonder, Continuous Replay, Ravel: Landscape or Portrait? and Story/. 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,” and Financial Times raved that “D- Man in the Waters radiates the clarity of love.”

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. As The New York Times states, “…it offers a clearer look at the tension between loose swing and angular articulation in Mr. Jones’s movement. It shows his skill in establishing a foreground and a background while letting them blend.”

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 work that “sticks in the mind” (New York Theater Wire), Continuous Replay “is a thorough primer in Jones/Zane style: sharp versus flowing, large versus small, straight versus angled” (The New York Times). A new score by Jerome Begin incorporates material from Ludwig Van Beethoven's String Quartet Op. 18 No. 1 and String Quartet Op. 135.

Ravel: Landscape or Portrait? (2012) 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. The New York Times describes the work as “made up of protean tableaus” with “Arresting moments…continually absorbed into the flow.”

Story/ (2013) is a continuation of the Company’s investigation in using indeterminacy as a choreographic tool. Following the model for the acclaimed Story/Time, the work employs a random menu of movement that is interrogated by Franz Schubert’s String Quartet No 14 in D Minor (Death and the Maiden) to craft an energetic conversation between the music and movement. Called a “strong” work with “compellingly enigmatic duets…’Story/’ is alive with glimpses of ordinary life” (The New York Times).

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 the career of 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. As New York Magazine says, “The combination of brisk formality and a deeply sensual attack…was riveting decades ago and it’s riveting today.” Commissioned by the ICA/Boston.

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* DOWNLOAD 2014-2015 EDUCATION PROJECTS *

About New York Live Arts New York Live Arts is an internationally recognized destination for innovative movement-based artistry offering audiences access to art and artists notable for their conceptual rigor, formal experimentation and active engagement with the social, political and cultural currents of our times. At the center of this identity is Bill T. Jones, Artistic Director, a world-renowned choreographer, dancer, theater director and writer.

We commission, produce and present performances in our 20,000 square foot home, which includes a 184- seat theater and two 1,200 square foot studios that can be combined into one large studio. New York Live Arts serves as home base for the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, provides an extensive range of participatory programs for adults and young people and supports the continuing professional development of artists. Our influence extends beyond NYC through our international cultural exchange program that currently places artists in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Funding Support

The creation of new work by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company is made possible by the Company's Partners in Creation: Ellen Poss, Jane Bovingdon Semel & Terry Semel; Anne Delaney; Stephen & Ruth Hendel; Eleanor Friedman; and Zoe Eskin.

Major support for New York Live Arts is provided by: The Brownstone Foundation; Con Edison; The Joseph and Joan Cullman Foundation for the Arts; Cultural Services of the French Embassy; Doris Duke Charitable Foundation; The Ford Foundation; The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation; French American Cultural Exchange (FACE); The Howard Gilman Foundation; The Grand Marnier Foundation; Jerome Foundation; Lambent Foundation; MAP Fund, a program of Creative Capital; The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; Mertz Gilmore Foundation; Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation; New England Foundation for the Arts; The Jerome Robbins Foundation; The Scherman Foundation; The Shubert 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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2014-15 Tour Schedule

July 14-21, 2014 February 5-7, 2015 May 11-16, 2015 July 20 @ 6PM Showing Atlanta, GA Annandale-on-Hudson, NY Jackson Hole, WY Emory University Work-in-Progress Showing of Dancers’ Workshop Body Against Body: Analogy: A Trilogy Creative residency Duet x 2, Shared Distance, May 16 @ 2pm Analogy (working title) Blauvelt Mountain Bard Creative Residency T2 http://arts.emory.edu/ September 12 & 13, 2014 @ June 1-17, 2015 8PM February 12-14, 2015 Montclair, NJ Fall for Dance @ The Delacorte Madison, WI Montclair State University Theatre Wisconsin Union Theater Creative Residency New York, NY Play and Play A (students D-Man in the Waters (Part I) perform in CR) June 18-21, 2015 http://www.nycitycenter.org http://uniontheater.wisc.edu Montclair, NJ Kasser Theater November 4-15, 2014 @730PM March 6 & 7, 2015 Montclair State University New York, NY Los Angeles, CA World Premiere: Analogy: A New York Live Arts UCLA/Royce Hall Trilogy, Part One, Dora: Story/Time #35, 36, 37, 38, 39 A Rite Tramontane www.newyorklivearts.org http://cap.ucla.edu/ http://www.peakperfs.org/

January 22, 2015 March 15, 2015 Boulder, CO Westport, CT VISIT Macky Auditorium Neighborhood Studios Gala www.newyorklivearts.org Play and Play A Special Gala Program: Duet, FOR UPDATES http://www.colorado.edu/mac Shared Distance, Continuous ky Replay

January 24-25, 2015 March 17, 2015 Denver, CO Williams, MA Newman Center for the Williams College Performing Arts A Rite Play and Play A http://62center.williams.edu www.newmancenterpresents.c om April 10, 2015 Albany, NY January 30, 2015 The Egg Palo Alto, CA Body Against Body: Stanford University Duet x 2, Shared Distance, Memorial Auditorium Just You Story/Time http://www.theegg.org/ http://live.stanford.edu/

SCHEDULE IN FORMATION – SUBJECT TO CHANGE

2014-2015 Education Projects

Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company Collegiate Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company Workshops Reconstructions and Classes

New York University Tisch School of the Arts At New York Live Arts: New York, NY Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company Workshop with Dancewave Reconstruction Fall 2014 August 4-8, 2014 Performances December 2014 & May 2015 http://www.dancewave.org/ Reconstruction and student performances of Ravel: Landscape or Portrait? (Movements 1 &4) Masterclass with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company http://www.tisch.nyu.edu/ November 15, 2014 http://www.newyorklivearts.org/programs/engage/worskhops.php New World School of the Arts Miami, FL Open Classes with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company Reconstruction Winter 2015 January 12-16, 2015 Performances April 2015 http://www.newyorklivearts.org/programs/engage/worskhops.php Reconstruction and student performances of D-Man in the Waters (Part I) http://nwsa.mdc.edu/ Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company Summer Workshop June 23-28, 2015 Northern Illinois University http://www.newyorklivearts.org/programs/engage/worskhops.php DeKalb, IL Reconstruction Winter 2015 On Tour: Performances April 2015 Jackson Hole Masterclasses, July 16 & 19, 2014 Reconstruction and student performances of Spent Days Out Yonder Colorado College Masterclass, January 23, 2015 http://www.niu.edu/theatre/ Emory University Masterclass, February 6, 2015 University of Wisconsin-Madison Masterclasses, February 13-14, 2015 Loyola Marymount University Williams College Panel Discussion, March 18, 2015 Los Angeles, CA Reconstruction Spring 2015 Performances April 2015 Reconstruction and student performances of Continuous Replay New York Live Arts Workshops and Classes http://bulletin.lmu.edu/dancedepartment-of-theatre-arts-and-dance.htm Shared Practice Saturdays throughout the 2014-15 Season Participating artists for 2014-2015: Kyle Abraham, Neil Greenberg, Emily Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company High Johnson, Bill T. Jones, Jennifer Monson and RoseAnne Spradlin. School Reconstructions http://www.newyorklivearts.org/programs/engage/shared-practice.php

Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts Bessie Lab in Composition with John Jasperse Hartford, CT August 20-24, 2014 Reconstruction Fall 2014 http://www.newyorklivearts.org/programs/engage/worskhops.php Performances October 2014 Reconstruction and student performances of Continuous Replay http://www.crecschools.org/our-schools/greater-hartford-academy-of-the-arts Partnerships

Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company Collegiate Bard College Annandale-on-Hudson, NY Creative Reconstructions Sixth year of ongoing partnership. Seven courses taught each year in the dance program. Live Arts also provides student advising, organizes campus-wide SUNY Potsdam events and creates extra-curricular classes and informal performances each Potsdam, NY semester. 2014-2015 faculty: Leah Cox, Beth Gill, Cori Olinghouse, Stuart Reconstruction April 2015 Singer. Performances April 2015 http://dance.bard.edu/ Creative reconstruction and student performances of Story/Time http://www.potsdam.edu/theater/ YoungArts

Third year of ongoing partnership. Bill T. Jones acts as artistic adviser to

YoungArts. Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company Teaching http://www.youngarts.org Residencies

University of Wisconsin-Madison VISIT newyorklivearts.org FOR UPDATES Madison, WI Dates and programs subject to change. Spring 2015 Classes taught in technique, improvisation, partnering and composition. Students perform Continuous Replay alongside the Company. http://www.dance.wisc.edu

Press Highlights

“[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

“…a serious, intricate, multidirectional centennial tribute to a work of art whose spell it deepens.” –Alastair Macaulay, The New York Times, on A Rite

“D-Man in the Waters radiates the clarity of love.” –Apollinaire Scherr, Financial Times on Play and Play: an Evening of Movement and Music

“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."

Jones’ ceremonial neckwear got a little heavier on Monday, when President Barack Obama conferred the National Medal of Arts on the Valley Cottage dancer choreographer. The two-time Tony-winner (“Spring Awakening,” “Fela”) was joined in the White House East Room by his fellow recipients. Among them: novelist Julia Alvarez, musical theater composer John Kander, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Dreamworks chief Jeffrey Katzenberg, singer Linda Ronstadt and documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles.

Jones was a 2010 Kennedy Center honoree and a 1994 MacArthur “genius.” He was honored with the 2014 Doris Duke Award, recognized as Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 2010, inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2009, and named “An Irreplaceable Dance Treasure” by the Dance Heritage Coalition in 2000.

Monday’s Medal of Arts citation read: “Bill T. Jones is recognized for his contributions as a dancer and choreographer. Renowned for provocative performances that blend an eclectic mix of modern and traditional dance, Mr. Jones creates works that challenge us to confront tough subjects and inspire us to greater heights.”

In an interview today, Jones, who had just landed in Santa Fe with his partner, Bjorn Amelan, said the medal isn't really for wearing.

"You don't put it around your neck. The question is what the most respectful place is. I don't have a large house, so some things go to my office in New York, at New York Live Arts. I am myself trying to figure out what does it all mean."

The honor put him, once again, in the presence of President and Mrs. Obama in the East Room.

"I'm a great fan of his and I'm always moved to be there. The Brooklyn Academy of Music, the place that has been important to the work I'm being rewarded for, was honored at the same time. And BAM's Joe Melillo said there was symmetry to our being awarded at the same time."

The White House, Jones said, isn't easy to get into.

"The security is remarkable, but the level of professionalism among the young people, all of whom serve as volunteers. It made me very proud. Everything was scheduled to the minute.

"What was so wonderful is that the President and Mrs. Obama were so relaxed. It is a state occasion, but at the heart of it were people: the young military people and President and Mrs. Obama. Very real and very warm."

Medals are good, Jones said, but the question always becomes: What's next?

What's next for the elegant dancer-choreographer is relaxing at the home of a dear friend in Santa Fe and, in two weeks, marrying his longtime partner, Bjorn Amelan.

"Our friend and his companion are getting married, so we're witnesses for each other," Jones said.

After his I-do list comes a to-do list, including:

+ A dance piece, "Analogy," inspired by the oral history of Amelan's mother, Dora, who lived in Vichy France during World War II. The dance will examine the hopefulness and resilience of youth and what it means to help other people and to live a life of purpose. "She's a fascinating woman."

+ Other theater projects, including at least one that "might find its way to Broadway."

+ An "adaptation of a serious American novel that I am pondering and working on with the author."

+ And trying to keep his dance company, New York Live Arts, vital, with "live performances that will serve the serve community that made me. That needs constant attention and fund-raising."

"There's a lot to be thankful for," said Jones.

Bill T. Jones was born in Bunnell, Florida in 1952 but raised in upstate New York where he would study ballet and modern dance at Binghamton State University. Upon graduating, he embarked on a story book career as co founder of the eponymous company with his late life mate, Arnie Zane.

Besides creating over a hundred original works, Jones has choreographed for everyone from Alvin Ailey to the Boston Ballet to the Berlin Opera. And among his many accolades are a couple of Tony Awards, an Obie Award, a MacArthur Genius Fellowship, the National Medal of Arts, and induction into the National Museum of Dance Hall of Fame.

Story/Time: The Life of an Idea is an ethereal memoir emblematic of this iconoclastic trailblazer’s unpredictable approach to everything he does. The book is basically an attempt to reduce to writing and photographs a trio of multi-media talks Jones delivered at Princeton University as part of the prestigious Toni Morrison Lecture Series.

This would be no mean feat since the endlessly-inventive author’s presentation at Princeton was an impossible to pigeonhole, experimental piece of performance art. The pages of the opus contain his musings mixed with photos and quotes from great thinkers, especially his mentor, John Cage.

Bill T. talks about how he had arrived at college an acting major, yet turned to dance which he saw as “a means by which I could validate my place in the world.” After all, he admits to having felt uneasy on account of his skin color and sexuality.

However, he would soon come to adopt the countercultural attitudes “You are not your body!” and “You will be free if you declare yourself free!” leading to the logical calculation that “The only cost of this freedom is to cut yourself off from the ‘straight’ world and any investments, influences, or entanglements it demands.”

The honest reflections of a fearless firebrand who not only did it his way but continues to reinvent himself to this day.

Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company Performs for Bard Prison Initiative Students 05-28-2014

Photo by China Jorrin

The world-renowned Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, in residence at Bard College this spring, gave a site-specific performance at Fishkill Correctional Facility in Beacon, New York, on May 7. The Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), which operates one of its six academic programs at Fishkill, invited the Company to perform and meet with students. Bill T. Jones choreographed a new piece for the event, entitled Fishkill / Movements 1 Through 45.

Hundreds of men incarcerated at Fishkill attended the performance, during which Jones also collaborated with a BPI student who sang duets of Down by the Riverside and We Shall Overcome with Rev. J. Edward Lewis, the prison's Protestant chaplain. Following the performance, Jones led a question and answer session, which included in-depth discussion about the role of the arts, and particularly dance, in American society.

In the program Jones wrote, "Movements 1 Through 45 is yet another opportunity to identify that important conversation that happens between the performers in the Company and a specific audience. In our life as a dance company, we travel a great deal and perform for many people we don’t really know. We are excited when we run into a situation such as this one, where we can create a dialogue and even the possibility of sharing the stage with members of the community."

This performance was made possible by the partnership between New York Live Arts and the Bard College Dance Program.

Bill T. Jones and Anne Bogart collaborate for A Rite world premiere at UNC by Chris Vitiello

Some of the most memorable art hits at just the right moment to express the full complexity of a great changeover. The Rite of Spring, with Igor Stravinsky's score, Vaslav Nijinsky's choreography and Nicholas Roerich's libretto and design, slammed into the European consciousness a century ago with such force that the audience rioted.

Today, cultural dynamics are smaller, faster and less coherent. We don't riot; we change the channel. But artists still make tumultuous work. Two of them— choreographer Bill T. Jones and director Anne Bogart—premiere their dance-theater work A Rite at UNC-Chapel Hill's Memorial Hall this weekend.

Jones has brought his company to the American Dance Festival in Durham many times. For her theater work, Bogart has collected two Obies, a Bessie and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 1992, she founded her

SITI Company with Tadashi Suzuki. Photo by D.L. Anderson A work commissioned by Carolina Performing Arts and Executive Director Emil Kang, A Rite is billed as a deconstruction of The Rite of Spring. It explores themes of war, science and hope, and struggles with the implications of constant change for the modern individual.

"This was really jumping off of a cliff, coming from the dance world and the theater world— although Bill's a theater whore, I will say," said Bogart in a public conversation last Thursday at the Ackland Art Museum, where the two artists were joined by Kang and UNC music professor Severine Neff. The collaboration recognizes affinities between today and the world of 1913, while also pulling in Jones' politics and Bogart's scientific interests.

"Here we are in 1913, in a time when the paradigms of culture were shifting radically: the birth of Cubism, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, Einstein's theory of special relativity. And I think we're in another paradigm shift now," Bogart said.

Jones is interested in the social contexts around Stravinsky's work. "If The Rite of Spring equals a precursor to the war, what did World War I mean to Americans and particularly to the America that is just now finding its voice, the America of people of color? I thought that a lot of those guys who left Europe after the First World War came back home and they no longer wanted to be called 'boy,'" Jones said, suggesting that a very different kind of modernizing began in the Modernist period.

"The civil rights struggle, which was going on before the war, got a boost from people having been in Europe."

On Monday, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a few hours before President Obama's second inauguration, we sat with Jones to talk about A Rite and reflect upon his career.

INDY WEEK: When Emil Kang approached you about this commission, what was your conception of The Rite of Spring and how has it changed throughout the development of A Rite?

BILL T. JONES: Emil quoted me the other night at the museum that I had said that I was terrified. That might be a little dramatic but this happens to all choreographers at some point. They're faced with the question: Do you want to step into this fire? Because everybody feels at some point in their career that they have to deal with The Rite of Spring.

I've always thought "Good for them. I don't need to do it. I'll do something else." I felt it was kind of a trap to try to reinvestigate Nijinsky's and Roerich's libretto. It was that story. The music can stand up to all sorts of treatments—witness Walt Disney and Fantasia. But there was something about the libretto and the immense spectacle that it was in its time. It changed fashion and changed the whole idea of how a theatrical spectacle can unfurl.

Are you continuing to create solo work amid all the different kinds of work you do now?

Not nearly, no. I do once in a while. I like to say now, glibly, that I dance now when I'm happy. When I'm very happy. And that usually happens in my living room when my companion is cooking and music is on that I love, or at a party with friends. I will do an impromptu solo. And they go under the title—someday I'll collect them—it's called "That Sweet Impediment to Greatness."

I love dancing to Al Green. For Obama's first inauguration, Toni Morrison asked me to do a benefit... so I danced a solo to "How Do You Mend a Broken Heart" by Al Green.

That's a great moment. And we have that moment again today. What does the second inauguration, and today being Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, mean to you? That's a fair question, on this day. I am confused. I am confused that he is being re-inaugurated on this day. First of all it is difficult to make the day pop for me. It would be easier if I wasn't here working. It's my day off. Did I wake up thinking "This is Martin Luther King Day?" No. I woke up thinking this was a day off and Rite of Spring, Rite of Spring, Rite of Spring, and I have interviews, and oh, this is Martin Luther King Day, and Mr. Obama, whom you have really given a great deal to... Why am I cool [toward him]?

Something is hurting. Something is sad. And anything I say sounds like I am beating up on the man who has become a symbol that I need and I would defend his back no matter what. But maybe it's a realization of the dreams we have—"I have a dream," that's one thing—but you better live fast and die young, right?

Heaven forbid you have a dream and you have to jump into the shit. And try to make something in an intractable situation. Martin Luther King now belongs to the angels and the ages, and his accomplishments.

Mr. Obama is very alive right now. Why doesn't he behave like an icon? Why doesn't he wave his magic wand and stand for change? Well, it doesn't happen. And is that a middle-aged man talking to you right now, about having realized finally, maybe, I can't just will it and the world will change? There is mud up to our waist. And why were you so arrogant as a young person to think it was any different for you and your era? Maybe that's what's hurting right now, on this day.

Well, you can always make new work and push at the mud, right?

Oh, you think that's what the work does? I'm not sure. That's the other thing. When we were going to make The Rite of Spring, and we were talking about Nijinsky and Roerich's sacrificial maiden, I said, before we even started the work, what's the news there for me?

The news is not about young tragedy but about the realization of aging, and the diminishing returns and cynicism. You know, April is the cruelest month, breaking up. Well, late summer is pretty cruel too, when you know the winter is coming.

This article appeared in print with the headline "Rethinking Stravinsky."

See Page 2 for more of our interview with Bill T. Jones.

Our reporter sat down with Bill T. Jones on Monday—Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and a few hours before President Obama's second inauguration took place in the nation's capital—to talk about A Rite and reflect upon his career and times.

INDY WEEK: Could you give a quick description of A Rite?

BILL T. JONES: Those things are not a lot of fun. I'll do my best. It always sounds kind of confusing and maybe a little silly sometimes. Let's put it this way. The motor of the collaboration is evident in the stage picture at any one moment. You have this quite varied community of people—different bodies, different shapes, different sizes and colors—that are all dressed differently. Sometimes there's at least a suggestion of a soldier here and there. Their dresses are quite lovely. They could be from the '20s or the '30s.

The movement has a distant relationship to what we consider archaic modern dance movement. You know, a lot of that that we associate with Martha Graham was probably born in her imagination on viewing The Rite of Spring. The movement can be quite athletic. A great deal of lifting and running, and big group patterns are important. The floor is used a lot, up and down to the floor.

There is a kind of subtle wink to the eyes of the connoisseur of The Rite of Spring, who knows the Joffrey Ballet's reconstruction, who knows certain motifs of the sacrificial virgin, and all that we have distributed liberally around our group. Imagine Leon, one of the actors from SITI Company. He must be the biggest guy on stage, a barrel-chested guy with a shock of red hair, and he is doing the shimmering movement of Nijinsky's sacrificial virgin.

We've had our way with the music, in terms of order. The very first music one hears in our show is the second half of the final "Dance of Death." So we've exploded the dramaturgy of Nijinsky and Roerich to suit our aims.

Anne [Bogart] has used the text of World War I soldiers. That's in the mouth of our "Walking Man," a conceit that I suggested. That we needed some human-scale personality in this giant historical landscape... actually is it a historical landscape of a contemporary take on a historical landscape that we're making?

We needed a person and I said it should be a walking man. And I wasn't sure he's walking where and from where. And with time we have found out more about him. He is a historical character but he very much walks into our time.

There's another soldier figure onstage that you assume they have a relationship even though the soldier is probably from somewhere in the 1960s military. And then there's even another historical figure who looks like a worker or air pilot maybe from today. The soldier adds kind of a thin spine to the proceedings; the other characters aren't as distinct. As I said, Anne created the Walking Man using liberally the text of World War I veterans.

And there is another character much beloved by myself and Anne, that is a contemporary physicist, talking about multiverses and entropy and concepts which, whether we like it or not, have become part of our consciousness.

The physicist picks up on Brian Greene's work?

Very much so. As a matter of fact I think we're even gently poking fun of Brian Greene. I like him a lot but he's erudite and casual. He's like the professor. Anyone who will listen, he will tell them. So that's three characters.

Oh, the musicologist—that's Severine Neff. I hope she's appreciated here as much as we appreciate her. She's become a great resource in this work but I think she's kind of a treasure in general. She just loves a certain brand of modern music. You have a very sophisticated music- going public here but if they had their druthers would they rather hear Beethoven, Debussy or Schoenberg? She loves Schoenberg and she knows her stuff. But there's something very approachable about her. Anne has recorded a lot of interviews with her and the language is taken verbatim, and our lead actress is brilliant. And I wouldn't call it an impersonation but she's created a lead character using Severine.

When Emil Kang at Carolina Performing Arts approached you about this commission, what was your conception of The Rite of Spring at that time, and how has it changed throughout the development of A Rite?

Emil quoted me the other night at the museum that I had said that I was terrified. That might be a little dramatic, but this happens to all choreographers at some point. They're faced with the question: Do you want to step into this fire? Because everybody feels at some point in their career that they have to deal with The Rite of Spring.

I've always thought 'Good for them. I don't need to do it. I'll do something else.' This is a wonderful opportunity. And when I understood that Anne was invited as well, and she and I had wanted to work together for years, and she proposed that we work together, it seemed like a no- brainer. Let's go for it. And maybe I can find another way past my prejudices.

Now, prejudices not about the work itself, but like I say, I felt it was kind of a trap to try to reinvestigate Nijinsky's and Roerich's libretto. It was that story. The music can stand up to all sorts of treatments—witness Walt Disney and Fantasia. But there was something about the libretto and the immense spectacle that it was in its time. It changed fashion and changed the whole idea of how a theatrical spectacle can unfurl.

So we felt, now we can do what we want to do. We can make a response. Emil even said, 'You don't have to use The Rite of Spring, but it should be about Stravinsky.' So it wasn't like he was twisting our arm. We could have used the Italian Suites, which I was just listening to today.

But then, when you start working with a theater company, and someone like Anne's intellectual mind and ambitions, you get sort of swept along. She's fearless and unjaded. Things excite her.

I'd like to ask you more about working with Anne. From the starting point, you both have a similar process. You both start with an opening question and then begin answering that question and follow that inquiry where it leads. But once you get into that, you have different ways of proceeding. Could you describe those differences and how those have fed back into A Rite?

I'll do my best because I'm still discovering those as well. What was it now, maybe 12 years ago? Anne has a yearly residence workshop at Saratoga. One year I happened to be there at the same time and I happened to find out about her great affinity and identification with modern dance, with contemporary dance.

She said to me just the other day that when she first started in New York she was actually in the spaces where contemporary dance was being done because she really eschewed the theater world. I don't remember her exact word but she found it stultifying or boring or hidebound or what- have-you, but that seemed to be really breathing in the possibilities of live performance. One night in the gymnasium there, all the people in our program, which were probably 40 young dancers from around the country, and people from her program, which were probably the same number if not more, were all sitting in a giant circle and exchanging across the circle ideas. Which was very refreshing. It's almost like romance—you get to a certain point in your life and you never think you'll get to meet another person who quickens your heartbeat like that. And I felt like our two forms were discovering each other.

And both of us are, in our own way, maybe outliers. You know, we have our success but we also aren't placed anywhere. That seems to be one of our attractions as well.

Now, as for our methods. What she was saying was, as I understood it, she appreciated dance had a practice. I think she means how most dancers do class every day, just to warm up and train your instrument. Actors do training when they're in the conservatory but once they're working actors they don't train per se. They might take a special class here and there, but they don't go every day to a ballet class. Not that she wanted us to do ballet, but she loved the fact that we had a practice which was, in a way, a physicalized, embodied, daily ritual that honed the skills that we needed. Which is, I think, what the Suzuki method and the Viewpoints practice of her company are all about.

And Anne has people there, both Will and Ellen, I think, have been there since she formed her company over 20 years ago? I wish I could say that. Dancers just don't hang around that long. Ten years is a long time. Some of them are my friends and we stay in touch, but literally the body can't do it.

So I think those are the things that we have been discovering about each other. Now, there is a collaborative aspect to both of our works, true. I ask people to contribute a great deal, like she does. But I feel a bit more like a coach or maybe a not-always-so-pleasant guy driving things. And Anne is strong but I never feel her anxious. I never feel like she's on fire or yelling at anybody. And I sometimes lose my temper and that sort of thing. That makes for a different working environment. Is it a male/female thing or just two personalities?

I feel like I am ultimately responsible. I don't know if she feels that. Constantly she is giving agency to the group. I give agency to the group particularly through my associate director Janet Wong, who's actually going to have the same billing as Anne and I do in this work because I was not able to be there in the first month or so of the work, and Janet got it started. And, at least for the first act, she laid out the bone structure of it and I came into that. And those ideas in the first act are now being referenced in the second act. So that's Janet Wong, who is extremely capable and organized but also has learned something from our company's way of working, asking the dancers for their input.

I saw the American Masters film Bill T. Jones: A Good Man, which is about the creation of Fondly Do We Hope...Fervently Do We Pray, a 2009 dance-theater piece concerned with Abraham Lincoln's 200th birthday. I couldn't stop thinking about how you and your company work in the studio. And of course there were fireworks in the film and it was very dramatic. But the more I thought about it—and you used the word 'coach' to describe yourself a moment ago—you were almost training your dancers to do something that had nothing to do with dance. There was a conceptual structure on top of simply getting a performance together. A philosophy maybe?

It seems something else to me. I think 'approach' is good. In a way, the performance that you were making was a means, not an end. 'As a result of making this, you will be able to do this, or be this.'

That's pretty astute and, god help us, I hope that someone is able to do justice to it because I'm too close to it. I'll just point to some strains. There is, of course, the history of how I started dancing.

It was the American Dance Asylum, which was us Young Turks in the early 1970s, working and trying to find a way to work communally. And not that we had a beleaguered, fist-up attitude— that I brought myself, that comes with descriptions of my personality and my African-American, post-civil rights take on things, and being a gay man, and so on. Liberation through 'If you don't stand up for something, you'll get trampled under the heels of the body politic.' That was Bill.

But then there's something about the American Dance Asylum, which I cut my teeth in. A place where you could be absolutely free, take refuge, or you could be as crazy as you like. And that was a worldview. We lived communally. We lived in a very impoverished kind of community, and we were doing works that nobody knew what the devil we were doing. And they hated us and yet we had to stand for something.

There was a thin line between an aesthetic choice and a lifestyle choice. You are what you do. And we are the remnants of the counterculture. And the counterculture stood for what? Well, you name it. We're still trying to figure it out now. Was it Jimi Hendrix shouting 'I'm gonna raise my freak flag high?' Freaks, we were freaks. You see what I'm getting at: It's a worldview.

It is a privilege to go into a studio every day and make something—what is that about? It is a spiritual activity.

I think that's what you're getting at because it's about whether you're giving all of yourself to it. Really giving all of yourself. How brave are you? You can have as much freedom as you're willing to fight for. And if I turn up the heat, you can have as much freedom as you're willing to die for. And what we're doing in modern art is we're testing the boundaries of individual freedom and agency.

What are you doing this moment? Are we thinking? Are we asking the right questions? Are we rigorous enough? And that's me talking to me, actually. But—and I usually say this to the dancers, but we're in a collaborative situation—the materials are the individuals in the room, and they are sublime materials. Those materials are thinking, feeling creatures with destinies and ideas. That's one branch.

The other one is a woman named Freda Rosen, from a wild, Trotskyite believe-it-or-not social therapeutic community—very controversial. But she saved me at a time when Arnie Zane and I were dealing with really deep issues in our relationship, issues of trust and accountability and intimacy. She would say things like "We don't do simple psychotherapy here. This is not a story about your mother or your father. We make 'changers' here. You change, and you become a changer." And, as I said, there was quite a controversial desire to reconfigure the world as you reconfigured yourself. Honestly, yeah. A white man and a black man having problems in a relationship is not just because they are a couple, but because they are literally the points where society pressures come from the public to the personal.

And there are reasons, Bill, why you have anxieties around money, and Arnie, why you have anxieties around Bill. You're both trying to be intimate and loving in a racist, homophobic... need I go on? You are of the society and you are trying to lead these exceptional lives as artists outside the society. So therefore everything you do is about this change and this pressure to push back. Heavy lifting for a dance studio.

You said something potent Thursday night, as an aside. You said, "Art is about pushing against something."

"Art happens when something is being pushed against." Which is actually, I believe, Keats. Because it was said to me, around Still/Here. A man walked up to me and he said that it was such a difficult work to observe, and he knew it was difficult to make, and he said, "Keats said, 'Art happens when something is being pushed against.'" He might even have said "pushed down."

So many of your pieces have an arc to them but you aren't preoccupied with resolution. One of my favorite pieces of yours is "Floating the Tongue" from The Breathing Show, in which you do a short solo, and then you repeat the solo while describing exactly what movements you are making, and then you dance the solo a third time while saying exactly what you are thinking with each movement. It's so instructive about how to make work, but also spiritually instructive.

You know it's the closest and most pure thing I can do except it does not fit tidily into having a dance company and into the business of dance. It was an avenue of investigation that's very much about the individual doing it. And that individual... you can't give that to everybody. In the last 20, 30 years of the company—that piece was probably conceived in 1981—there have been maybe two or three people who have successfully been able to perform it. And that's a lot of dancers.

I can't imagine anyone else performing that.

Well, because a person has to have the questions that Bill has, I suppose. Or even... I don't know. This leaves me open to the question: What is the technique behind it? There's been a struggle in my soul for the essentialist, expressionistic human being to cope with the grand tradition of Western making, and maybe making in general. Everything has to, well, Anne says everything has to have three parts.

First, you have to have something to say. Then you have to have an idea of how to say it. And the third one is technique. What's the technique of it?

I've given people what the problem is, and these are the skills you need. Now go develop them. Talk to yourself on the subway. Watch yourself watching, because in that piece there's one movement and you're supposed to be doing the movement and then describing what's going on in that moment in the room. So, how do you practice that?

And while you're brushing your teeth in the morning, or taking a shower, describe every little movement that you're doing. Do you have the vocabulary, the conceptual reach to compress an action—and we know that at any one moment an action is comprised of thousands of little sub- actions—which ones are you going to pull out?

You have to have something of a fiction writer, something of a scientist, something of a poet. Compress that. And now you've got to keep moving, as well. Do you have the facility and the stamina for that? Who wants that problem, and to what end? To reveal your psyche. That's what I thought modern dance promised, with the avant garde.

It was not about a spectacle designed for Memorial Hall. It was about a group of people sitting in a very intimate relationship to each other and focusing on what happens to a person over time as they try to undertake a problem like that. That was "Floating the Tongue," which came from a Buddhist meditation exercise that was taught to me by a meditation teacher in the 1970s. And he called it "Floating the Tongue."

Are you continuing to create solo work through all the different kinds of work you do now?

Not nearly, no. I do once in a while. I like to say now, glibly, that I dance now when I'm happy. When I'm very happy. And that usually happens in my living room when my companion is cooking and music is on that I love, or at a party with friends, or maybe at a performance if we just had a wonderful run in a place like Naples or Paris and I feel particularly generous, I will do an impromptu solo. And they go under the title—someday I'll collect them—it's called "That Sweet Impediment to Greatness."

Now, why that? Because as good as it feels to Bill, they are ephemeral. It's a great pleasure to speak to you about this because you remember these things, but these things are like throwaways and they melt. Now, it can't be great if, first, they're made spontaneously and, next, not designed to last. But in a guilty way I indulge in them and I call it "The Sweet Impediment to Greatness."

I love dancing to Al Green. Have you seen online?

I haven't, but I soon will.

For Obama's first inauguration Toni Morrison asked me to do a benefit in our community, so I danced a solo to "How Do You Mend a Broken Heart" by Al Green. And that is "That Sweet Impediment to Greatness." It was for that moment, and it was pulled together. And some nice dancing in it.

That's a great moment. And we have that moment again today. What does the second inauguration, and today being Martin Luther King Jr. Day, mean to you?

That's a fair question, on this day. I am confused. I am confused that he is being re-inaugurated on this day. First of all it is difficult to make the day pop for me. It would be easier if I wasn't here working. It's my day off. Did I wake up thinking "This is Martin Luther King Day"—no. I woke up thinking this was a day off and Rite of Spring, Rite of Spring, Rite of Spring, and I have interviews, and oh, this is Martin Luther King Day, and Mr. Obama, whom you have really given a great deal to... Why am I cool [toward him]?

Something is hurting. Something is sad. And anything I say sounds like I am beating up on the man who has become a symbol that I need and I would defend his back no matter what. But maybe it's a realization of the dreams we have—"I have a dream!" that's one thing—but you better live fast and die young, right?

Heaven forbid you have a dream and you have to jump into the shit. And try to make something in an intractable situation. Martin Luther King now belongs to—what happened to Lincoln?—he belonged to the angels and he belonged to the ages, depending on who you listen to, right? Martin Luther King now belongs both to the angels and the ages, and his accomplishments.

Well, you can always make new work and push at the mud, right?

1913 was quite a year, and saying “Happy 100th Anniversary” mightn’t be the most appropriate salutation. Forget such minor irritations as the United States initiating an income tax. Think instead about artists who caused upheavals and provoked explosive reactions. In Paris, the premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes incited a riot in the theater, depending on whether one abhorred or adored Igor Stravinsky’s music, Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography, and Nicholas Roerich’s costumes. In New York, wandering through the eighteen galleries at the Armory Show transported visitors from the familiar world views of, say, James McNeill Whistler and Edward Hopper to the shock of Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp.

Angles battled curves, dissonance hammered at consonance, rough surfaces warred with refined ones, discontinuity threatened the accepted order. And World War I seethed toward its 1914 horrors, when its overture, the Second Balkan War, broke out months after the First Balkan War ended. Boundaries were breached and shifted; nations arose and fell and rose.

It was, I think, the intention of Bill T. Jones, Anne Bogart, and Janet Wong to capture in their 2013 A Rite, the productive and destructive elements boiling in Europe at that time, and the reverberations felt in art, science, culture, and everyday life. Sacrifice plays a role in A Rite, but there’s no sacrificial virgin chosen to dance herself to death in order to ensure that spring will come. There are no riots—either on the stage of Sosnoff Theater or among the spectators who’ve come to Bard’s Fisher Center for the opening event of Summerspace 2013. The primitivism that marked the imagined Russian tribes of the 1913 ballet edges obliquely in when a passage from Stravinsky’s Sacre, reimagined by Birdsongs of the Mesozoic, arouses a jazz-happy gathering bent on Charleston-ing the night away. The stylized poster at the back is of a black entertainer, which calls to mind the Parisian interest in another kind of “primitive” art—that from “l’Afrique,” where France had accumulated thirteen colonies.

The collaboration of Jones and Bogart, whether or not the process was always peaceful, presents disruption onstage but undercuts it with cooperation. The six actors in Bogart’s SITI Company and the nine dancers in the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company work with admirable skill and collegiality. When A Rite begins, they’re all moving wildly and individually—not to Stravinsky’s gentle, opening call but to the full orchestral fury of the final “Sacrificial Dance.” You’d be hard put, in most cases, to identify who is a dancer and who an actor (the two companies solved the distinction by calling them all “dactors”). Here Jones draws on Nijinsky’s choreography: the performers stand huddled forward, their bent knees shivering; like the women in photos of the 1913 ballet, they put one hand to a cheek and support its elbow with their other hand; in unison they fall and rise again; they jump up over and over, as did the Chosen Maiden.

The overall rhythm of A Rite is one of rushing on and off the stage, of moving and freezing, traveling forward through a sequence and retrograding it. Images coalesce in tableaux, then dissolve. Stools are tossed by hand to hand, put in place, sat on, removed. A piano is wheeled on. Or off. Stravinsky didn’t compose the section of his masterwork in order, and Jones and Bogart don’t present them in order. Cubism meets Stravinsky. Still, the score dominates and illuminates everything, whether a performer idly plays a few notes of the opening melody on the piano, or a character holds up a small cassette recorder) that emits a crackly recording, or Birdsongs of the Mesozoic jazzes up the music, stressing its syncopations. Three different major orchestras are heard, along with other groups. Robert Wierzel’s lighting abets the strangeness, the broken apart and oddly reassembled images.

When the tremendous score is dissected like this, you begin to hear it and admire it in new ways. One of the most wonderful passages occurs when I-Ling Liu sings a melody from the “Spring Rounds” section in a high, almost unreal voice to Lauren. Another happens when all the performers gather and sing a choral arrangement of (I think) the same part.

The spoken text, drawn from a number of sources, is a powerful ingredient—connected, yet disconnected. Two vivid SITI members do the most talking. Will Bond, shell-shocked and anguished throughout, speaks—sometimes stammers— words drawn from the testimonies of World War I veterans. When he is lifted or tossed about within the group, you can almost feel the convulsions of battle. The pinhead shell wounds on the back of his neck that he speaks of are intermittently referred to, as when Jenna Riegel several times soothes him. The most interesting verbal material, delivered by Ellen Lauren, is based on interviews with the distinguished musicologist Severine Neff (she is on the faculty of the University of North Carolina, where A Rite premiered in January). I don’t know whose beguiling idea it was to have Lauren wear spectacles and a nondescript dress (costumes by James Schuette) and speak with a down-home manner and a Lake Woebegon accent. She presents the news of the 1913 premiere and a fragmented analysis of the music—along with offhand contemporary references— as if she were doling out cookies to neighbors.

For instance, Leon Ingulsrud and La Michael Leonard, Jr. have been helping Akiko Aizawa to walk along a path of stools that others keep moving forward. Then Talli Jackson, Antonio Brown, and Barney O’Hanlon hold Aizawa high in the air and fly her over Bond’s head. Aiziwa dreamed, she says, “that sunrise was coming;” she recites a poem in Japanese. Then everyone clusters to walk along together, gesturing and smiling. So it seems to come from nowhere when Lauren begins: “If you think of it, if you think of it on an access. That like usually your melodies arpeggiate a triad, OK, that you have the chord going linearly and the chord going vertically. In this piece the chords are vertical but there is nothing linear.” And, as she talks on, the music for the “Ritual of the Rival Tribes” swells around her voice.

Stephen Duff Webber talks quite a lot, much of the time channeling Jonah Lehrer’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist, among other works. Webber speaks of alternate realities, of the human being as “a bag of particles.” While he discourses on this last, the performers circle Bond, bumping him as they pass.

In fact, everyone gets to talk—at least a little. A modest, relatively polite version of the pandemonium at the premiere of Rite of Spring occurs when the cast members move the stools into a line at the front of the stage and—in single words or short, chopped phrases— dispute a changing array of issues. Order and disorder in the music, harmony and disharmony (in life as in art), war and peace, performers and spectators, what it was like to work on A Rite. In the end, Stravinsky drowns out their arguing, and they pick up their stools and go.

You might ask, “Is there dancing in all this?” Yes, but not for its own sake. Every passage of movement portrays tumult or facilitates stability and comradeship. Erick Montes Chavero has a wild solo moment. So does Jennifer Nugent. Various people are lifted and turned and flipped. All join in various groups to form gestural tableaux. At the opening of the second part, when the music depicts the circle that Nijinsky’s maidens walked in (she who stumbled most becoming the victim), all the performers walk in pairs, entering, one couple at a time, through the central opening in the black hangings at the rear, and feeding into an accumulating and de-accumulating pattern that obliges partners to separate into symmetrical circles, meet again, and exit. It’s not as simple as it sounds.

Each performer comes to the forefront briefly, whether with words, gestures, or more strenuous movement. Whom have I not mentioned yet? Shayla-Vie Jenkins? Joseph Poulson? Just typing their names is enough to make me see them in action.

Bond, as the angry, soul-wounded soldier, threads his way through everything—sometimes joining, sometimes not. At the end, Jones and Bogart invoke the post-traumatic stress disorder that plagues returnees from the war in Iraq and the violence that sometimes results. The implication is that this man sacrificed his sanity in the service of his country, and that idea merges with another iconic contemporary tragedy: mass shootings by a single gunman with almost unlimited ammunition. Bond mimes killing Riegel, his helpmeet, then everyone else. One by one, they spin to the floor and die. The high drama and the killing do match the climax of the original Rite of Spring, but the obviousness of the political message unsettles me.

The ending is even more ambiguous than it is in Stravinsky’s scenario. The coming of Spring (or hope) takes the form of the “dead” rising, helping one another up, and walking slowly offstage. Meanwhile, at the back, slim black ribbons descend, and behind them, Bond travels with big movements across the stage. The effect is, uncannily, almost that of a strobe light; he flickers, jolts, yet keeps going.

Like many immersed in dance, I’ve seen a number of works set to Stravinsky’s score, including Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer’s scholarly, yet imaginative reconstruction of the 1913 work for the Joffrey Ballet. This is the first new one to pull me into the music and its history in so many unexpected and provocative ways.

By this point in the centennial year of “The Rite of Spring,” you’ve probably heard the story about the riot.

Paris, 1913: the curtain rises on the latest production from Serge Diaghilev’s stylish Ballets Russes, and within moments of the ballet’s eerie opening notes, the whispering and jeering begins. Stravinsky’s harsh, dissonant score; Nijinsky’s convulsive, earthbound choreography; the premise of a virginal sacrifice: for an audience used to ballet as fairy tale, in a city on the brink of World War I, it’s too much to handle. A protest ensues, spilling into the streets. The scandal goes down in history.

Of course, there are many versions of that story, none of them definitive — except for the going-down-in-history part. Our mythologizing fascination with that night persists, most recently in the form of “A Rite,” an ambitious new collaboration between the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and the SITI Company, the theater troupe directed by Anne Bogart. The work, roughly an hour long, had its New York City premiere on Thursday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Howard Gilman Opera House as part of the Next Wave festival.

Unlike many “Rites,” this is more than a choreographic rendering of Stravinsky. It wrestles not only with the score itself, in all its strange, strident, startling intricacy, but with the cultural moment of its inception, the lore surrounding its premiere, its endurance, the very notion of time’s passage, the slippery dance between how something happened and how we remember it.

In a program note, Ms. Bogart discusses what and she and her co-creators, Mr. Jones and Janet Wong, were going for: “How do we create a rite for our modern world, informed by the legacy of the original but containing the complexities and paradoxes of our own times?”

That’s a tall order, and one that, in fleetingly imaginative bursts, these companies — seamlessly integrated into one tumultuous dance-theater tribe — follow through on.

Stravinsky, as we learn from the chatty, schoolmarmish musicologist played by Ellen Lauren, began composing “Rite” with those infamous pounding chords in the middle section. Fittingly, “A Rite” launches straight into riotous dancing. As the the fiercely committed cast emerges from shadow into Robert Wierzel’s moody lighting, their collective advance fractures into a lashing, swirling morass.

A recurring motif, this maelstrom periodically resolves into a militant march, heralding the work’s central figure: a veteran (Will Bond) haunted as much by images of war as by Stravinsky’s sometimes soothing, sometimes virulent cacophony. It’s hard to tell where music ends and lived experience begins.

“A Rite” draws its musings on time and existence from writings by the physicist Brian Greene and the Japanese poet Shuntaro Tanikawa, among other sources. But its philosophizing feels thin, cloying and force-fed compared with its rousing physical embodiments of the score: a hooting, stomping, clapping rendition toward the beginning, an a cappella version at the end. More of those, please.

At times it’s tempting to dismiss this work as heavy-handed. But when a car alarm sounds on your walk home from the theater, and you instantly confuse it with Stravinsky, you feel that the minds behind this modern “Rite” are onto something.

“A Rite” runs through Saturday at the Howard Gilman Opera House, Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Avenue, at Ashland Place, Fort Greene; bam.org.

A version of this review appears in print on October 5, 2013, on page C6 of the New York edition with the headline: When Parisians Stormed Out, and the Earth Trembled.

DANCE REVIEW Inventive New Works Swoop In Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane at the Joyce Theater

By BRIAN SEIBERT Published: March 31, 2013

All the works in the 30th anniversary season of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company at the Joyce Theater are set to classics of chamber music, played live. But where the first program is dominated by celebrated dances freighted with history, the second consists of two premieres created for and by the current company. In the older works the dancers look dutiful; in the new they look wonderfully like themselves.

The choreography that made its New York debut on Wednesday is credited to Mr. Jones “with” the company and its associate artistic director, Janet Wong. The dancers seem entirely at home in the movement, in both its formal sophistication and casual body language. You learn something about each person. Yet these are clearly works shaped by a master craftsman, controlled by an active mind. Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance What’s more, without being beholden to their Company Antonio Brown, left; LaMichael scores, both dances are sensitive to the mood, Leonard Jr., on the floor; and Erick Montes texture and shape of the ravishing music, given Chavero performing Wednesday in “Story/” at lustrous form by the Orion String Quartet. The the Joyce Theater. shifting fit between the structure of the dances and the structure of the music is often exciting. The two dances share images and blur together a bit in memory, but the whole evening is a fine match of high-grade music and dance. For one dance, “Ravel: Landscape or Portrait?,” Bjorn Amelan’s set fills the stage with an outline of a cube in rope, a three-dimensional frame, and the way the dancers huddle in one corner or spill out beyond the borders to the composer’s String Quartet in F Major is part of the dance’s drama. Robert Wierzel’s lighting paints in cool hues and dappled shadows, sometimes as if through dense foliage.

Much of the dance is made up of protean tableaus, linked chains of dancers that circle and suddenly stretch to a sculptural stop. But dancers also just stand around and watch. Intriguing solos for Erick Montes Chavero, who can seem puckish because of his small size, bring out a specifically sardonic harlequin charm. Slouchy duets for Jennifer Nugent and Talli Jackson give a snapshot of a recognizable relationship I haven’t seen before in dance. Arresting moments are continually absorbed into the flow.

The coordination of “Story/” with its score, Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” quartet, is more surprising because it grew out of an earlier work,“Story/Time” (2012), which had a different score and experimented with chance operations. The new “Story/” inserts some chanting and stomping between sections of Schubert, but this is unobtrusive meddling, and the restlessness of the choreography is generally well mated to the music’s Sturm und Drang.

Some of the randomness remains, as a leavening agent, in dancers rolling across the stage with their own smoke machines or holding green apples while making baseball signals. Secret signs — handshakes, hands on heads like antlers — abound, sometimes enabling a connection, sometimes not.

The dance is strong in male bonding, and Ms. Nugent again has compellingly enigmatic duets with men. Like “Ravel,” “Story/” is alive with glimpses of ordinary life. The dancers sniff their armpits.

Though neither work offers a deeper understanding of the music, both honor the music with parallel inventiveness. Both end near where they begin, and the stories in between amount to a portrait of a company in beautiful shape.

The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company continues through April 7 at the Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, Chelsea; (212) 242-0800, joyce.org.

Last updated: March 27, 2013 5:40 pm Bill T. Jones, Joyce Theater, New York – review By Apollinaire Scherr ‘D-Man in the Waters’ was the highlight of first of two programmes of dances to classical string music

©Lois Greenfield Bill T. Jones dancers Antonio Brown, Erick Montes Chavero and LaMichael Leonard, Jr

Choreographers often inscribe a dancer’s character into a part, but Bill T. Jones has suffused every step of D-Man in the Waters with the spirit of the eponymous D-. The 1989 portrait of the artist as a young and Aids-doomed man does not take after the choreographer’s other work. It is not self-reflexive, Dadaist or ironic. It does not confront or tease. It happily forgets about us – and itself. D-Man in the Waters radiates the clarity of love. High-spirited yet with an undercurrent of trouble, the 35-minute piece to Mendlessohn’s early octet concludes the first of two distinct programmes of dances to classical string music, delivered live by the sumptuous Orion Quartet. On opening night, Spent Days Out Yonder ended before its take on Mozart could register, and the addition to Continuous Replay of spliced and diced Beethoven proved one play too many. Only D-Man’s music and movement were deeply mutually attuned.

Jones translates Mendelssohn’s youthful extremes – a rocking phrase finished off with an elaborate flourish, for example – as wide-eyed inventiveness: variations on a theme not only popping up all over the stage but announcing their make-believe status. The dancers do not dive into water, they do the steps that mean “dive into water” when the only resource is land. Unlike Paul Taylor’s playful and grand Esplanade, the steps are not found from daily life but made from the imagination, not God-given but willed. The dancers “doing the crawl” or tip-toeing like drag queens on a catwalk are not Everyman but the inimitable D-Man – Demian Acquavella in full, dead at age 32 a year after the dance debuted. Jones presents him as a joker, a diva, a sensualist, a fighter, a pimp walker, a brother, a fairy and a free spirit. D-Man saw his life slipping away: there are passages in which the dancers sink on to their backs on the floor or open their arms to an emptiness a person used to fill. The costumes in camouflage signal deadly struggle. But D-Man remained an innocent. Innocence is a tricky gambit – for an artist or anyone else – and Jones usually steers clear. But, as D-Man in the Waters reveals, to maintain that state after so much pain is a special form of grace.

Dance lovers in southern Taiwan owe a huge debt of gratitude to the programmers of the annual Kaohsiung Spring Arts Festival (高雄春天藝術節) for managing to arrange an appearance by Jones’ company, only the second time it has visited Taiwan. The troupe’s first trip was almost seven years ago, in September 2007, when it performed Jones’ Blind Date at the National Theater in Taipei.

Of great interest to the local media at that time was Taiwanese dancer Lin Wen-chung (林文中), who had been with the company for seven years and was in his final weeks with Jones, having decided to move back home to strike out on his own.

This time around, another dancer is happy to be returning to Taiwan to show family and friends what she has been doing in New York City. Taipei National University of the Arts dance program-graduate Liu I-ying (劉奕伶) has performed with several local troupes, including Ku and Dancers (古名伸舞蹈團) and the Neo-Classic Dance Company (新古典舞團). She joined Jones’ group the year after Lin left, in 2008, although she had served as an apprentice the previous year.

The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company is now in its 31st year, and luckily the 62- year-old Jones shows no signs of slowing down. In addition to being a dancer and prize/fellowship-winning choreographer, Jones is a writer and a theater director, having co- written and directed the Tony-award winning musical Fela about Nigerian composer and activist Fela Anikulapo Kuti, which premiered on Broadway in 2009.

Early on in his works he began incorporating both text and video, breaking down the walls between a purely “dance” piece and theater. Text plays a key role in Story/Time, which premiered in 2012.

Story/Time was inspired by avant-garde US composer John Cage, whose professional life became inextricably linked with another modern dance great, Merce Cunningham. Cage released an album in 1958 called Indeterminancy, in which he read a series of short stories as David Tudor improvised musical passages on a piano in another room. The trick was that neither man could hear what the other was doing. Cage also performed the piece on stage.

Jones took that idea of mixing narrative with another art form, yet not deliberately connecting them. He wrote about 170 largely autobiographical stories, each a minute or so long. For each show, he chooses 70 of the stories to tell, reading them out in his beautiful, melodious voice while seated behind a simple desk — behind a row of eight green apples — as his dancers perform snippets of choreography that he either created fresh for this piece or assembled from past works along with his long-time associate artistic director Janet Wong.

Like Indeterminancy, the confluence of stories and dances in Story/Times is a matter of chance, not design, but the show is no less spellbinding for it. It is hard to begrudge the Kaohsiung festival for managing to snare Jones’ and company, given that Taipei usually scores all the big-name performances, but I hope Taipei-area fans do not have to wait another seven years to see the troupe again.

Every dance tells its own story, usually without words. In “Story/Time,” however, Bill T. Jones sits in the spotlight and tells one-minute stories while nine dancers from his company swirl around him.

The piece, which debuted at Montclair State University in 2012, takes its inspiration from John Cage's 1958 “Indeterminacy” and Cage's subsequent 1965 collaboration with Merce Cunningham, “How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run.” Jones has some 170 stories about everything from the death of his partner, Arnie Zane, in 1988 to Cunningham's pantomiming of a cat. For each performance, 70 of these narratives are selected at random for Jones to read against choreography drawn from about 105 minutes of his work.

At the Institute of Contemporary Art on Friday, Jones, sitting at a table with a mike, a glass of water, and some green apples, recalled having a low-fat lunch with Virgil Thomson in New York, holding a vivid green hummingbird in his hand in New Mexico, studying sex workers in Amsterdam, watching Zane photograph Louise Nevelson, listening to a conversation between his mother and Anjelica Huston. A digital clock at the rear counted off the first 13 stories, disappeared, then resurfaced at the 66-minute mark. Transparent white scrims were moved about to create cubical spaces; dancers lounged on a black sofa. At one point Jones got up and walked off, leaving the dancers on their own. When he returned, there was an interval of deafening sound that all but drowned out his voice. Then steam enveloped the stage, and eventually the audience, as the dancers rolled about, some of them naked.

Jones is not a MacArthur Fellow, a Kennedy Center honoree, and a two-time Tony Award winner for nothing. At the outset, his stories had too much personal feeling and quirky detail for his dancers’ generic, dimly lit movement. They preened and posed during the opening tale of Jones meeting friends for lunch; they offered insight into the secret life of rental-car employees; a wrestling match accompanied Jones's recollection of reading Cage on a mesa while watching the first sunset of 2012. Once the steam dissipated, however, and the back-wall blinds were raised to reveal the harbor, the dancers started to make up an enticing story of their own, a group work about unity and diversity. By the end, they had almost stolen Jones's spotlight.

Jeffrey Gantz can be reached at [email protected].

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

1 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.

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."

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

Bill T. Jones: Inside the Famed Choreographer's Rehearsal Process

By Laura Bleiberg Tue., Sep. 25 2012 at 11:14 AM Categories: Dance

The Kennedy Center honoree notices all Stefano Paltera

Choreographer, dancer, writer, director and winner of many awards and honors, Bill T. Jones turned 60 earlier this year. But he's still the most fit, most chiseled man in this room, which is filled mostly with college students who are 40 years his junior.

Jones is in Dance Studio 3 at Cal State Long Beach for an all-day rehearsal of his 2003 dance piece, Reading, Mercy and The Artificial Nigger. In November, 12 students will perform the 45-minute work (plus Jones' companion piece, Mercy 10 X 8 on a Circle). It will be the first time a group other than Jones' New York-based Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company has performed the piece, which is based on the Flannery O'Connor short story, The Artificial Nigger.

Several of Jones' dancers and CSULB dance professor Keith Johnson, a former company member, began teaching and rehearsing the work with the students a month ago. Jones flew in last weekend for a day and a half of rehearsals. Time is precious.

Working to get it just right Stefano Paltera

He double-checks the spacing of bodies. He points with a thrusting arm at offending moves. He explains the importance of absolute exactitude of every body position and of moving with "urgency." He calls every student by name. He jumps up and occasionally demonstrates steps, standing utterly immobile as he watches them repeat it back to him. He wants to know "who's responsible for that" so he's assured that after he leaves, there is a shepherd assigned to oversee every passage.

"Cue!" he calls, to signal that everyone starts moving.

"Are they in control of the material?" he asks his main assistant, Leah Cox, the company's education director.

Stefano Paltera With student Belinda Lutes

And he tells stories that surprise, such as how when he first choreographed this dance -- performed to an abridged version of the 1955 tale. "I was so nervous about doing a narrative. I thought narratives were corny." He's not afraid of narrative now, though, and he changes some steps and gestures, including making subtle revisions to the dance's very last pose.

A support team surrounds Jones. Johnson sits to his left, Cox to his right, and Ezra LeBank, the theater department's head of movement (who is supervising the student narrators) sits next to Cox. Dance major Katie Marshall, one of two understudies, lies on the floor with an open notebook, notating script and movement changes. Across the room, student Gabby Grady turns the music on and off and serves as stage manager. Cox holds a MacBook Pro, occasionally checking a recording of a past performance.

After nearly two hours of tightening and polishing, it's time for another runthrough. Cox reassures the students that it will be difficult, but they should try to remember and incorporate all the revisions just made. Jones leans back in the plastic folding chair, long legs outstretched and arms folded.

He's poised that way only briefly, and is soon leaning left, then right, giving notes, making comments. The students push themselves to become dancers. Their shirts are drenched; the room has a sweaty odor.

"Christopher is very subtle," Jones says with pleasure. Then, they have finished. The briefest of pauses, and Jones is applauding, smiling, laughing, and congratulating. So do the others.

"Good work, good work! You took your notes well," he praises them.

Do they have questions? he wants to know. Then he explains further about this story of mercy, fear, love and racism. Then it's time to go and Jones personally shakes hands and grins at each student.

"Anyways, thank you very much!"

In Collaboration: Bill T. Jones and the CSULB Department of Dance will take place at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center, 6200 Atherton St., Long Beach, 8 p.m. Nov. 16-17, $25, (562) 985-7000, www.Carpenterarts.org Laura Bleiberg blogs at laurableiberg.com. Follow us on Twitter at@LAWeeklyArts and like us on Facebook. http://blogs.laweekly.com/arts/2012/09/bill_t_jones_long_beach_dance.php#more

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.

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.

Dance legend says his art speaks to social injustice NOVEMBER 15, 2012

Bill T. Jones, an internationally known artist, choreographer, dancer, theater director and writer, visited the campus of Salem College last week to headline the first-ever installment of the June Porter Johnson Series for the Visual and Performing Arts.

Jones founded the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company with his life partner, the late Arnie Zane, in 1982. Since that time, the group has won international acclaim, performing in more than 200 cities in 30 countries across the globe.

The State University of New York at Binghamton alumnus has also won high marks for his body of work, which spans nearly four decades and is the recipient of a host of coveted accolades, including the Kennedy Center Honors in 2010. He describes himself as “an eclectic choreographer who is very interested in the ways that creativity and innovation meets the world.”

Jones now serves as executive artistic director of New York Live Arts, which was formed last year when his company merged with the Dance Theater Workshop. Over the years, Jones’ dancers have built a reputation for their unorthodox approach to the art form, drawing from a broad cross section of disciplines to construct creative, thought provoking works that inspire audiences to think as well as be entertained. Growing up the son of migrant workers in the tiny hamlet of Wayland in upstate New York gave Jones a unique perspective and a sense of open-mindedness that has persisted throughout his career, he said.

“Dealing with people who are different than I am and my whole understanding of their strength, that’s very much a theme that’s always going on with the work,” remarked Jones, who was born In Bunnell, Florida, but moved north with his family during the Great Migration as a child. “…Let’s face it: I’m an African American growing up in America, so the fabric of my life has been very much informed by that.”

Jones has been known to use his art to speak to the issues he’s witnessed or faced in American society.

“There are people who would disagree with me. They don’t think art is the place to talk about social justice issues,” Jones conceded, but he disagrees. “…The body is a thing we hold in common, regardless of the thing that divides us. This kind of push and pull is a ripe subject for the art. I think that’s why dance, and art in general, is so powerful, so potent.”

The Dance Company performed “Body Against Body,” one of Jones’ vintage pieces, at Salem before a crowd of nearly 700 in the Hanes Auditorium on Friday night. On Saturday evening, Jones talked about his life and career before another large crowd.

“This was the piece that made my reputation with Arnie Zane,” Jones explained. “It’s a historical work, very exciting, very idiosyncratic.”

The June Porter Johnson Series was created with a gift from Johnson, a philanthropist and staunch supporter of the arts, explained Heidi Echols, an associate professor and director of the dance program at Salem.

“She loved Salem College and she loved the arts, so her gift was with the stipulation that we bring in big artists and make it free to the community and raise the profile of the arts at Salem College,” Echols explained. “It’s an endowment, so it will sustain the future of Salem College.”

The series will present two artists: Jones and performance artist Laurie Anderson in its inaugural year, with the goal of hosting one major artist in the coming years, Echols said. “The arts need to be nourished and that’s what I really hope the community and the students will see,” the Durham native said of the series. “We can all in some way be patrons of the arts and that in turn gives so much back to us.”

Echols said she felt Jones was the perfect person to kick-off the series, because of the multidisciplinary approach to his work, which often includes music and poetry, and his strong commitment to education. Several of Jones’ dancers accompanied New York Live Arts’ Associate Artistic Director Janet Wong to the Twin City earlier in the week, to work with a group of 18 art students who were hand-picked to work alongside the professional artists to create a work to be showcased Friday. It was a once in a lifetime experience for the students, who were chosen based on auditions, Echols said.

“One of our seniors said she will remember this for the rest of her life. That is something that we heard from each student in so many forms, over and over again,” commented the UNC-Greensboro alumna. “It was an amazing experience for them, to say the least.”

Though he doesn’t typically travel with his company these days, Jones said he makes a point of supporting dance and art education wherever possible. The 60- year-old added that he enjoys working with members of younger generations.

“It’s always amazing to look into the faces of excited and sometimes, maybe skeptical, young people because in those faces, one sees oneself,” he remarked. “I think of myself at age 19, hungry to become part of the discourse, to get out there and show my stuff. It makes me feel a sense of responsibility and reward that there is still this spirit to create. That’s a sacred thing.”

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.

Well-Traveled Revolutionary Returns ‘Fela!’ on Broadway at Al Hirschfeld Theater

Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times Summer insurrection: Sahr Ngaujah, center, in the revival of “Fela!,” directed by Bill T. Jones. By BEN BRANTLEY Published: July 12, 2012

Though often regarded as the season of sloth, summer has its own energy. It’s what you sense in the suddenly wayward walks of city dwellers, liberated by wearing as few clothes as possible. Purposeful strides have been exchanged for something hypnotic, rhythmic and faintly subversive.

You feel that people could break into a dance at any second, or open a fire hydrant, or maybe even storm a barricade. Not for nothing do we celebrate both the American and French Revolutions in sweaty old July.

If you have even an ember of this energy within you — and who doesn’t right about now? — you can expect “Fela!” to fan it into a flame. This exultant and unorthodox biomusical about a singing African revolutionary, first staged on Broadway in 2009, reopened with perfect timing for a limited engagement on Thursday night, smack between Independence Day and Bastille Day.

Running only through Aug. 4 at the Al Hirschfeld Theater,“Fela!” incorporates the spirit of summertime insurrection as infectiously as any show I can think of. As staged by the choreographer Bill T. Jones, and written by Mr. Jones with Jim Lewis, “Fela!” translates one man’s life into a nonstop banquet of movement both sensuous and angry. And though this production has been on the road — in Europe as well as the United States — pretty much nonstop since it last saw Broadway, it shows no signs whatsoever of flagging.

The production’s title character, the chart-topping Nigerian pop star and government-baiting political agitator Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, is still portrayed by the electrifyingly insolent Sahr Ngaujah (with Adesola Osakalumi taking over for some performances). But the show’s leading ladies — Melanie Marshall (as Fela’s daunting and undaunted mother) and Paulette Ivory (as one of his 27 wives), who both appeared in the National Theater version in London — will be new to New York audiences.

Ms. Marshall’s uncanny, range-roving singing in itself justifies revisiting “Fela!” Yet while it seems strange to say of a musical that chronicles the impact of a charismatic leader, “Fela!” isn’t about individual performances. Or rather, it’s about a lot of individual performances — and I mean every single dancer, singer and band member — forming a collective whole in which singular style is never sacrificed. “Fela!” is about as close as showbiz gets to a democracy of talent.

That, above all, is what strikes me in seeing “Fela!” for the fourth (or is it the fifth?) time. Choruses of Broadway musicals are traditionally most notable for their synchronicity, with everyone executing exactly the same steps at the same time. Kathleen Marshall’s recentrevival of “Anything Goes” was the ne plus ultra example of the effectiveness of this approach.

But while all the performers in “Fela!” are moving to the same beat — Afrobeat, to be exact, and mostly via songs written by Fela, who died in 1997 — each does so in his or her own distinctive way. And while the costumes by Marina Draghici (who also designed the kinetically charged, graffiti-splashed set) reflect a single sensibility, an urban-tribal hybrid, they are worn with highly individualized style. Even in rigorously choreographed ensemble numbers, each figure onstage remains a distinct and inviolable personality.

They’re a reminder of the infinity of movements that can be achieved with arms, legs and, above all, hips. The pelvis is the true solar plexus of “Fela!,” and it is put to extraordinarily potent use by the dancers here. This is true not only of the exquisite, multiform and definitely nonsubservient women portraying Fela’s wives (who present the best argument I’ve seen for polygamy) but also of the spliff-sucking male dancers, whose choreographic vocabulary ranges from tap (but as you’ve never seen it before) to acrobatics. The show, which takes place during what is advertised as the last concert in Fela’s self-contained nation of a compound in Lagos, features a variety of striking set pieces. These include a stately but sassy funeral procession, a biographical montage of Fela’s years in the United States (where he meets the still baffling and underwritten character played by Ms. Ivory) and a hallucinatory visit to the ancestral afterlife.

But the number that best captures this production’s essence comes early. It’s a piece resonantly titled “Originality/Yellow Fever,” and it allows the different performers to embody the elements of Afrobeat style. There’s no question that they’re all drinking from the same musical source, but each also emerges as a brilliant solo artist.

When these dancers later move robotically in a satirical song called “Zombie,” you may find yourself feeling bereft. These people, like most people, were never meant to be identically programmed. And though Fela’s political platform may be hazy at best (peace, love, rock ’n’ roll and marijuana, man), you have a visceral awareness of the individual freedom at stake and in danger here. In “Fela!” dancing isn’t just entertainment — it’s life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Fela!

Book by Jim Lewis and Bill T. Jones; music and lyrics by Fela Anikulapo-Kuti; additional lyrics by Mr. Lewis; additional music by Aaron Johnson and Jordan McLean; based on the life of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti; conceived by Mr. Jones, Mr. Lewis and Stephen Hendel, inspired by “Fela: This Bitch of a Life” by Carlos Moore; directed and choreographed by Mr. Jones; sets and costumes by Marina Draghici; lighting by Robert Wierzel; sound by Robert Kaplowitz; projections by Peter Nigrini; wig, hair and makeup design by Cookie Jordan; production stage manager, John M. Atherlay; general manager, Roy Gabay; technical supervisor, Paul Rambacher; company manager, Judy Wilfore; music direction and coordinator, orchestrations and arrangements by Mr. Johnson; musical arrangements by Mr. McLean; music consultant, Antibalas; creative director/associate choreographer, Maija Garcia; associate director, Niegel Smith. A Broadway/National Theater of London production, presented by Ruth and Stephen Hendel, the National Theater of Great Britain, Ahmir Thompson, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Fela LLC, Mr. Gabay, Edward Tyler Nahem, Slava Smolokowski, Chip Meyrelles/Ken Greiner, Douglas G. Smith, Steve Semlitz/Cathy Glaser, Daryl Roth/True Love Productions, Susan Dietz/M. Swinsky/J. Deitch and Knitting Factory Entertainment. At the Al Hirschfeld Theater, 302 West 45th Street, Manhattan; (212) 239-6200, telecharge.com. Through Aug. 4. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes.

WITH: Sahr Ngaujah and Adesola Osakalumi (alternating performances as Fela Anikulapo-Kuti), Paulette Ivory (Sandra), Rasaan-Elijah Green (Djembe-“Mustafa”), Ismael Kouyaté (Ismael), Gelan Lambert (J. K. Braimah/Tap Dancer/Egungun) and Melanie Marshall (Funmilayo).