Bill T. Jones

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 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.

Jones has been called "one of the most notable, recognized modern-dance choreographers and directors of our time."

Bill T. Jones was born 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.

From the mid 1970’s until 1981, Jones and his partner, Arnie Zane, toured the world dancing sexually provocative duets.

Jones had also danced solos.

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.

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, 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.

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.

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

The work Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land is about how people are different racially, sexually, and other ways.

It is about working through these differences to reach a better place.

It is about being strong but still yearning for acceptance and tolerance.

Jones's company is made up of a diverse group of individuals, each with their own unique contribution.

The piece is also about Jones conflict with faith.

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.