Bill T. Jones - Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company - Interview - Biography

Dance Magazine, Nov, 2003 by Elizabeth Zimmer

BILL T. JONES STARTED OUT RAILING AT THE WORLD, IN IMPROVISED MOVEMENT AND IN LANGUAGE, BUT THIRTY YEARS ON THE stage have mellowed him somewhat. In 2003, his choreography still engages both movement and language, but now the movement is set on an ensemble of 10 dancers and 2 apprentices, and the language belongs to famed Southern writer Flannery O'Connor, whose work is read aloud in Jones'S breathtaking new Reading, Mercy and the Artificial Nigger, a highlight of the troupe's current, twentieth-anniversary season.

The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zanc Dance Company hit the New York big time very, quickly. Jones and Zane, partners in life and art since 1971, had shown their work and choreographed separately and together in the city for about five years, mostly in "downtown" spaces.

In 1983 they were invited to perform at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, collaborating with drummer Max Roach on Intuitive Momentum. A year later Secret Pastures, with sets by graffiti legend Keith Haring and costumes by fashion star Willi Smith, was also commissioned by BAM, as was Animal Trilogy in 1986. They became the darlings of the interdisciplinary performance community, collaborating with visual artists such as Haring, Robert Longo, Bill Katz, and Gretchen Bender, and with a range of composers. From humble beginnings in upstate New York college towns, they'd achieved all international profile.

Two decades on, Jones and his associates are still on lop, but much has changed. Zane died of AIDS-related lymphoma in 1988; several cherished company members, as well as Haring and Smith, were also lost. In another BAM commission, the 1990 Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land, Jones and the ensemble realized a longtime dream of Zane's. It toured internationally and made headlines with its many guests--including Jones's mother--and the involvement of crowds of naked community members at each stop. Jones was presented a Dance Magazine Award in 1993, and a MacArthur "genius" prize in 1994. Now, at 51, he is innovating in a more technical direction. His partner of ten years, Bjorn Amelan, is a sculptor, the company's associate artistic director, and its set designer. Perhaps his closest collaborator is former ballet dancer Janet Wong, the rehearsal director, charged with transferring Jooes's movement--micro-isolations, undulations, abrupt changes of direction, tone, and mood--from video to the bodies of the dancers, where the choreographer edits and polishes it. He calls it "playing the bones."

TO HAVE A COMPANY FOR TWENTY YEARS have to develop trusted collaborators who know you, so that you have a dialogue, not a monologue," Jones says. "We think a lot about style. If I truly want to share with dancers my understanding of what dance is, someone has to create exercises that invite them to consider and taste what Bill is considering and tasting. People ask me if it's technique. I say, 'No, it's style.'"

After years spent butting theoretical heads with the greatest choreographers of fire twentieth century--borrowing, deconstructing, or sharing sources and strategies with the work of such legends as George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, and Merce Cunningham--Jones is trying to consolidate his accomplishments, codify his style and technique, and secure a home for his company.

"We want to move to Harlem because it has some of the most beautiful spaces for dance," observes the choreographer. "It's a community that's redefining itself. A person like myself, still redefining and wanting to put down roots--that community and I could have a symbiotic relationship."

At the moment, because he has no headquarters, he has no school. Company class starts with yoga, and "recognizable alignment exercises borrowed from classical dance." Sometimes Wong teaches ballet; she has, Jones says, "a deeply understood sense of classical alignment. She's danced Balanchine. She loves Trisha [Brown]. She appreciates Merce."

"To do Bill's work you need a deep understanding of techniques ranging from classical ballet to contact improvisation and everything in between," says Wong. "My role is to help dancers' bodies become open and responsive, to be at one point an empty vessel and at the next completely filled, to be able to inhabit the movement and become it."

Jones's current dancers hail from six states, Russia, Turkey, Taiwan, and Mexico. They're dazzlingly diverse in color, background, and size. Many are conservatory trained. More than 400 women came to his last audition, many of whom had never encountered his work.

"I'm trying to get my dancers to be more curious about the field," he says, "to go and look and build a sensibility, have all opinion. There's something about nurturing. Everything I've done and said--as a black man, as a gay man, as an HIV-positive man, as an artist--some young person is watching. That's what it means to have been allowed to live."

Jones himself was born to migrant laborers, and raised in New York's upstate Steuben County. Through high school he was a track star and performed in plays and musicals; he thought, until he got to college, that he was beaded for Broadway. He hit college at a ripe moment for renovation, and became an avant-gardist, studying contact improvisation and absorbing a lot of theory. He partnered with Zane, a photographer, at the very time when videocassette recorders were becoming widely available. For decades his creative process has employed video to record improvised movement, which he (or an associate) then learns and teaches to others.