Dance Master: Bill T. Jones
One of the most influential choreographers of our time, Bill T. Jones is the Co-Founder and Artistic Director of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company and the Artistic Director of New York Live Arts. He currently operates out of Manhattan, and is (even now, through the pandemic) consistently choreographing and producing live work both in New York and around the world. His company was born in 1982 from his partnership with choreographer and dancer Arnie Zane, who was diagnosed with AIDS and later died in 1988. Jones’s own HIV positive status led him to a career that was fueled first by the AIDS epidemic and later spread to identifying, highlighting, and dissecting prominent social issues in his work.
One of his more well known works is “Still/Here”. Choreographed and debuted in 1994, the evening-length work explored what it is like to live with a life-threatening medical diagnosis. The piece was called “a meditation about mortality in which Jones incorporated the movements of terminally ill people whom he’d met in the free dance workshops he’d set up for them, the patients becoming, in a sense, collaborators” by the New York Times. However, the work also garnered intense controversy, including the refusal by one dance critic to call him and his work “literally undiscussable”. This is a repeating theme throughout Jones’s career.
In discussing one of his more recent works, “Analogy”, which explores identity as a whole with focusses on experiences of Jewish people who were touched by the Holocaust (of which his Mother-in-Law was one), Jones says “I’m going to be speaking in a way that’s very personal, and yet I’m going to be dancing in another way, and you will be obliged to decide how to process it all and make it into a thing which you and I agree is supposed to be happening here: an artistic event is supposed to be happening here.”
Jones has choreographed more than 120 works, some of which were commissioned (Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, New York City Opera, etc), some of which were on Broadway (Fela, Spring Awakening), and some of which were choreographed with his late partner Arnie Zane.
Though still alive and far from the end of his career, Bill T. Jones’s legacy lives on in many modern choreographers. The combative, insightful, and transcendent way he brings prominent social issues to the forefront of his art has inspired many other choreographers to do so as well.
“This is what I call participation in the world of ideas. That is what art-making is.”
If you want to learn more about Bill T. Jones, you can visit the New York Live Arts website.
Below is the trailer for one of his most famous works, “Story/Time”, in which 70 1-minute stories were told using chance-procedure and inspired by John Cage’s work.