Keeping Up with Bill T. Jones

Art

The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company celebrates 30 years of music, art and movement

Although at 61, and after 40 years of performing, Bill T. Jones could respectfully retire, the iconic choreographer believes that an artist is “committed to participating in the world of ideas…and as an artist, are you willing to help build this world?” Jones has done much to help build the world of dance, and this month the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company celebrates its 30th anniversary season, with Jones as executive artistic director of New York Live Arts, the Chelsea performance venue created through a merger between Dance Theatre Workshop and the company Jones founded with his partner of 17 years, Arnie Zane, who died of AIDS in 1988.

Indeed, Live Arts is a performance venue where artists from a broad array of fields can build a world and then some, and interdisciplinary shows and discussions on the mind/body relationship are staged with a special focus on the audience experience.

"There is something political in body-based work."

It is an instinctive environment for Jones, who notes that his work with Live Arts feels much like coming full circle from his early days as a choreographer. “I was very literary, reading Proust, thinking about memory, identity, politics and how to understand my experience,” he recalls of that time. While his work has been defined by ideas, it has also been largely influenced by visual art, born in part out of his relationship and partnership with Zane, an acclaimed photographer. “Arnie believed more in the image and had a fine visual sense,” Jones explains. The two began their groundbreaking duets based on contact improvisation — a form of dance that didn’t require technical proficiency. “Anyone could dance with anyone, and that space was defined by bodies rolling around in time. All these things were a heady mixture,” says Jones.

Shayla-Vie Jenkins leads company dancers in the repetitive line work that comprises “D-Man In The Waters.”

Dancer I-Ling Liu in the angular precision of a Jones moment.

Dancers raise arms as if in offering during rehearsal for “D-Man In The Waters.”

Steeped in a dance milieu also informed by the 1960s everyday movement work of The Judson Dance Theater, Jones’ first years in New York exposed him to the performance art of the 1980s, a genre in which artists such as Bruce Nauman were finding inspiration from the continued experiments in the dance world. It was an era, Jones adds, when the avant-garde performance space, The Kitchen, was a creative crucible, “a place that was mixing up the disciplines. We walked right into that—Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, Jane Holzer, Eric Bogosian. That’s where I first saw Elizabeth Streb, Molissa Fenley. It was a new year that reset all our ideas about movement and looking—that movement was a type of three-dimensional sculpture, a time-based sculpture.”

The duets with Zane were filled with pauses and moments of stop-on-a-dime stillness that celebrated and juxtaposed differences. While Jones was focused mainly on the movement, Zane concentrated on what the bodies looked like as shapes in motion. “That idea was very important to us. When, I, with the body that I have — an athlete’s body, a black man’s body — when I move and when I stop there is a moment that allows the world to look at me as an object and for better or for worse that was something powerful and intriguing enhanced by Arnie’s desire to capture this.”

Dancer Arthur Aviles rehearses “D-Man In The Waters,” a role he originated.

Jones went on to collaborate with many visual artists, notably Keith Haring, whose sensationally colorful and graffiti-centric work made for a provocative pairing with Jones’ often-extremist sensibility. “It was a confluence of ideas and people that led us to Keith,” Jones recalls.  The collaboration, a naked Jones painted head-to-toe with Haring’s bold hieroglyphs, is captured in Tseng Kwong Chi’s photographs. Similarly, the works commissioned by Live Arts all focus almost exclusively on the rigor and nuance of body movement. “There is something political in body-based work,” says Jones. “There are bodies and gravity and the trajectory of being born and having to die. There’s so much drama and unanswered questions about our bodies, and as a result there’s a great deal of fascination.”

"There’s so much drama and unanswered questions about our bodies, and as a result there’s a great deal of fascination. "

Next week, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane dance company will have the New York run of its 30th anniversary season. Performing with live music by the Orion String Quartet and with the music of Schubert, Mozart and Ravel, the pieces celebrate the collaborative work of musicians and dancers. Among the new works that will be performed is Story/, developed out of choreographic experimentation, and random pairing sequences of movement from older works set to the highly emotional music of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden. “The music is disturbing and feverish,” says Jones. “Story/ is asking itself questions — what is its background and what is its present? How does it continue to sustain itself? By constantly playing and combining and recombining.” 

The same could be asked of Jones himself, who responds over the phone from a retreat in northern New Mexico, as if writing notes for a new piece of choreography: “By continuing to be interested in movement, in my body, it keeps me from turning inward, turning cold,” he says. “I’m standing here with the snowcapped mountains and the sage brush, my fragile body in a fresh landscape.”