William Tass Jones, known as Bill T. Jones (born February 15, 1952), is an American choreographer, director, author and dancer. He is the co-founder of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. The company's home is in Manhattan. Jones is Artistic Director of New York Live Arts, whose activities encompass an annual presenting season together with allied education programming and services for artists. Independently of New York Live Arts and his dance company, Jones has choreographed for major performing arts ensembles, contributed to Broadway and other theatrical productions, and collaborated on projects with a range of fellow artists.
Early life and education William Tass Jones was born on February 15, 1952 in Bunnell, Florida, the tenth of 12 children born to Estella (née Edwards) and Augustus Jones. His parents were migrant farm workers and later worked in factories. In 1955, when Jones was three, the family relocated to Wayland, New York. Jones was a track star in high school and also participated in drama and debate. After his high school graduation in 1970, he began to attend Binghamton University via a special admissions program for underprivileged students. At Binghamton, he shifted his focus to dance. In an interview, Jones noted: "[Binghamton] was where I first took classes in west African and African-Caribbean dancing. Soon I started skipping track practice to go to those classes. It immediately appealed to me. It was an environment that was not about competition." Jones's dance studies at Binghamton also encompassed ballet and modern dance.
Career Early years During his 1971 freshman year at Binghamton, Jones met and fell in love with Arnie Zane, a 1970 graduate of the university who was living in the area honing his skills as a photographer. The personal connection they forged evolved into a personal and professional relationship that lasted until Zane's death from AIDS in 1988. About a year after meeting, the pair spent a year in Amsterdam, Netherlands. On returning, Jones and Zane connected with dancer Lois Welk, who introduced them to contact improvisation, an emerging dance technique popularized by Steve Paxton that emphasizes intertwining partnering and shifts of weight and balance between partners. With Welk and another dancer, Jill Becker, they formed American Dance Asylum (ADA) in 1974. ADA was organized as a collective and performed nationally and internationally while also offering classes and presenting performances at its space in Binghamton. While the members of ADA generally choreographed their own works, they used a collaborative development process in which each member informed the activities of the others. Jones created a number of solo pieces during this period and was invited to present in New York City beginning in 1976, performing at The Kitchen, Dance Theater Workshop, and the Clark Center for the Performing Arts, among other venues.
Jones's works during this period, such as Floating the Tongue (1979) and Everybody Works/All Beasts Count (1975), combined his elegant style of movement with spoken passages that explored and improvised on his reactions and memories evoked by the dancing, ranging from episodes in his life to digressions on social issues. Dance historian Susan Foster has characterized these works as using "the resonances between movement and speech to show the very mechanics of meaning-making and to deepen viewers' perceptions of the number of ways a movement can mean."
In 1979, Jones and Zane felt that their collaboration with Welk and Becker had reached its conclusion. They were also interested in living in an area more supportive of both the art they were making and their identity as an interracial gay couple. They moved to the New York area in late 1979, settling in Rockland County, where they soon bought a house.
The physical contrast between Jones (tall, Black, gracefully athletic) and Zane (short, White, sharply moving), together with contact improvisation techniques of intertwining and lifting formed the basis of many of the pair's dances during this period. The works they created together fused Jones's interest in movement and speech with Zane's visual sensibility rooted in his work as a photographer. Their duets featured film projections, stop-and-go movement and framing drawn from still photography, singing, and spoken dialogue.Foster, Susan. "Simply(?) the Doing of It, Like Two Arms Going Round and Round" in Dils, Ann, editor; Albright, Ann, editor. Moving History/Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2013. . At the forefront of their works was their political and social focus, and the unusual—for the period—pairing of two male dancers and a frank acknowledgement of their personal relationship. A trilogy of duets the pair created during this time, consisting of Blauvelt Mountain (1980), Monkey Run Road (1979) and Valley Cottage (1981), firmly established their reputations as important new choreographers.
Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company From the mid-1970s until 1981, Jones and Zane toured the world dancing sexually provocative duets. Jones had also danced solos. In 1982, the pair formed the Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane Dance Company, recruiting a troupe of individualistic and nontraditional performers who represented different body sizes, shapes, and colors." "Jones, a choreographic provocateur, presents his ideas about identity, art, race, sexuality, nudity, power, censorship, homophobia, and AIDS-as-chemical-warfare with a streetwise, in-your-face attitude." Works such as Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land (1990) and Still/Here are some of his most thought-provoking works.
Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin
Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promise Land premiered in 1990, two years after Jones lost his life partner, Arnie Zane. Throughout his career, Jones' sense of alienation from society and its constructs and politics regarding race, gender, and sexuality inform his choreographies, and this work is no different. In particular, Jones said that Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promise Land is about how "we" (performers, choreographers, and audience) can navigate through differences to arrive at a commonality. Jones's work contains four acts; the first three engage with his and the performers' personal histories and their interfacing with social histories through images, citations, and references, and the last segment engages with the philosophy of liberation, the definition of home, and commonality amongst differences.
Act 1: The Cabin examines and rearranges the story of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. The Cabin provides a revisionist history of the character of Uncle Tom through citations (both personal and historic). Jones uses images from his personal history of people being punished to portray violence and death. Jones acquired these images through his and his mother's memories; he noticed, in retrospect, that stories about whipping that his mother told him resonated with him and influenced the whipping choreography.
Rather than revising history, Act 2: Eliza engages with the counterfactual history of what would have been true for Harriet Beecher Stowe's character Eliza if circumstances were different. Jones explored these "what ifs" through movements and the identities of his performers. He created five Elizas, each with unique movement profiles informed by Jones's experience and the experiences of the dancer representing each Eliza, which allow the audience to infer the range of emotional states and desires among five versions of the same character. The first represents a historical Eliza accompanied by Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I A Woman" speech. The dancer's movements reference Jones' memory of his grandmother resting her hands on a hoe; her intermittent joy is captured in the sway of her hips. The second is a modern-day Eliza who engages with the "evils of sexism"; her tight fists portray her anger. The third controls men, but her personal fears remain inside her; her strength manifests through an uncompromising spine. The fourth Eliza lacks autonomy, shown through the limp arms in her choreography; she needs her identity awarded back. A man dances the last Eliza in a mini skirt and heels; he intensely invites the audience to make assumptions about racial and gender identity. Jones engaged with far-reaching social predicaments and personalized ones that he and his dancers experienced to signal the "what-ifs" of Stowe's Eliza.
Jones described Act 3: The Supper as a dialogue with his mother's faith. The Last Supper was a prominent image in the houses that Jones grew up in. Further, Jones recognizes it as a shared experience in poor homes in general. He deconstructs the Last Supper image and exposes all the questions it does not answer through a chaotic tableau that ends in a rap about justice.
The final section, The Promise Land, was the most controversial at the time, and it was not always performed, but when it was, local community members were cast in the production. Nudity is the central image of this section; at the beginning, a nude body starts as one painful and undesirable thing, and by the end, the audience can see nudity as a commonality among all people. This found commonality is not a resolution but rather stillness and peace.
Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promise Land confronts the trials and tribulations of those outside the typical constructs of society, leaving people with the question, how many groups of people and experiences can be taken under the saying "free at last?" (one last reference to the Black American experience).
Still/Here controversy Although Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land was one of Jones's largest and most political productions, the 1995 New York premiere of Still/Here led to a great deal of controversy and discussion. Still/Here is about dying, based on videotaped statements of people suffering from deadly diseases such as AIDS and cancer.Teachout, Terry. "Victim Art". March 1995. It features a video score by artist Gretchen Bender based on excerpts from interviews with people who had received such diagnoses, together with a commissioned musical score, spoken text and movement. This work raises the question of whether art should be political. Most critical comments were favorable for the production, especially since many dancers were affected by AIDS. Still/Here was well received on its 1994 international tour. Newsweek called it "a work so original and profound that its place among the landmarks of 20th-century dance seems ensured." However, Arlene Croce, dance critic for The New Yorker, wrote in her article "Discussing the Undiscussable" a sharp negative critic of artists who present themselves as victims. Croce was so disgusted by "victim art" that she refused to see the production. Croce blamed politics for the sensation of victim art. "The arts bureaucracy in this country, which includes government and private-funding agencies, has in recent years demonstrated a blatant bias for utilitarian art-art that justifies the bureaucracy's existence by being socially useful."