Jones, Bill T. 1952(?)—

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Bill T. Jones 1952(?)—

Dancer, choreographer

Bill T. Jones is an innovative dancer and choreographer whose most famous works have been based on a loving partnership and the pain of loss. Jones and Arnie Zane formed two dance troupes and had established a growing following and earned excellent reviews when Zane fell ill with AIDS. The two continued to dance their characteristically formalist duets until just before Zane’s death in 1988. Soon after, Jones created an extraordinary dance called Absence, which evoked the memory of his late partner and lover, and addresses the varied feelings associated with bereavement. Zane’s death is only one of the many subjects with which the choreographer and his troupe have wrestled; Jones said in People that “a dance can come from my fears about aging or about the betrayal of the environment. 1 just want this funky company to say, ’Yeah, life hurts like hell, but this is how I keep going. I have a sense of humor. I’ve got my brothers and sisters. I’ve got this ability to make something out of nothing. I can clap my hands and make magic.’”

Jones’s early life was nomadic: His parents and their twelve children worked where they could, mostly in Florida. Jones later became a star high school athlete in New York, where he also gained valuable early stage experience and became an award-winning amateur actor. As a student at the State University of New York in Binghamton Jones began to question his artistic direction and sexual orientation. He told People: “A lot of things were changing in my life, one of which was meeting Arnie and starting my first relationship with a man. I didn’t feel comfortable being a jock anymore, and the theater department was too conservative for me. So dance reared its beautiful head.” Soon after their introduction Jones and Zane traveled together to Amsterdam, where they lived for several years before returning to New York and forming the American Dance Asylum. That troupe performed—completely naked— to great local acclaim. Jones and Zane would manage, nonetheless, to avoid the predictability that early success often creates.

In 1982 Jones and Zane formed another dance troupe; the new group, however, was accused of selling out because they had created what New York magazine described as “big, splashy spectacles in which outra-geousness or fashion, of social and political attitudes— melded blithely with earlier formalist concerns.” Most

At a Glance…

Born c. 1952; raised in Florida and Wayland, NY; son of migrant laborers. Education: Attended the State University of New York at Binghamton c. 1971.

Dancer and choreographer. Co-founded, with Arnie Zane, the American Dance Asylum c. 1974, and the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane dance company, 1982. Principal works include Absence, D-Man in the Waters, and Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

critics, though, agreed that the troupe’s progressiveness in both subject and execution demanded serious attention. Interview called the Jones/Zane troupe “one of the freshest and most innovative modern dance troupes in the world,” relating how at “their breakthrough performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival in 1982, when they performed with jazz drummer Max Roach, [they] reinvented the language of movement.”

The dance company’s future hung in the balance when Zane became ill in the mid 1980s. Jones feared that making Zane’s illness public might adversely effect their funding, but Zane insisted on going public in hope of educating people about AIDS. By refiguring the crisis as artistic material, the troupe began exploring the emotional and physical impact of AIDS in their dances. “Living and dying is not the big issue,” Jones told the MacNeill Lehrer Report in 1987, as reported in People. “The big issue is what you’re going to do with your time while you’re here. I [am] determined to perform.” Zane’s death in 1988 was reflected in dances of loss, grieving, anger, and ultimately, acceptance. The company encountered financial problems that year, partly because of Zane’s inability to dance. People recounted that “the troupe toured less and less often and nearly declared bankruptcy in 1988 but was saved by a group of artist friends who sold their works to raise $100,000.”

The company pulled together to support Jones emotionally after Zane’s death, again using dance as a catalyst for their grief. The piece Absence was composed by Zane to depict the poignancy of a dancer who has lost a partner of many years. Jones called up the memory of Zane by sometimes seeming out of balance on stage, lacking a counterweight, and then pausing forgetfully for his partner’s steps. Critic Robert Jones responded in People to a 1989 performance of Absence; he described “a shimmering, ecstatic quality that was euphoric and almost unbearably moving.” Tobi Tobias, dance critic for New York, said that the work took “its shape from Zane’s special loves: still images and highly wrought, emotion-saturated vocal music.” When another troupe member fell ill with AIDS soon after Zane’s death, Jones choreographed D-Man in the Waters, which depicted dancers struggling with fateful tides.

Triumphs for the troupe after these painful losses included a premiere at the Houston Grand Opera in the fall of 1989 and a debut at the Munich Opera Festival in 1990. Like Absence, Jones’s next important piece, Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was inspired partly by Zane— conflict was still a theme, but not strictly as an effect of death. In the New York Times Jones explained the origins of Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s: “I think of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel as a wonderful liberal tract. Amie Zane and I were talking about the Last Supper a couple of months before he died, and the idea of the Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin sort of started as a joke. After Arnie died, I began to look more closely at the idea. There is so much about people being torn from each other and people in pursuit of each other and with the kind of robust athletic partnering that we do, I think we’ll produce something quite evocative.”

The subjects in conflict are meant to be resolved in the course of Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which is divided into distinct parts. The opening section of the dance is a fast-paced summation of Stowe’s book about slavery, using nontraditional casting, mime, and masks to emphasize the role-playing and absurdity of slavery. The next portion is a series of four solos by women, who in turn present the troubles of a slave, a battered woman, a lesbian, and a prostitute. Jones then dances a solo portrait of Job, the biblical character ravaged by misfortune as a test of his faith in God. Next, the biblical reference to Job becomes a tableau of the Last Supper. The final part of the dance is presented by an enlarged troupe—the core company, joined by others, “stages a sixties love-in,” as it was termed in New York. “It’s amazing how this sort of cheaply sentimental catharsis can still get to you,” the magazine ventured.

Tobias took a broad view of Jones’s choreography for Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin. “Dance is not, primarily, what it’s about. In genre, it’s a multimedia extravaganza. Although there’s plenty of movement— vibrant solos in an eclectic vocabulary, sternly patterned group work—someone’s usually talking at the same time. … [It is a] work bristling with anger, energy, and provocative questions, but one apparently still ’in progress.’” Commenting to Tobias, Jones said of the work, “This piece must start as a fight and end as a huge song,” testimony to his ongoing commitment to take life’s jumbled and troubled experiences and make them meaningful and beautiful through his art.