Bill T. Jones

Choreographer

• Born: February 15, 1952
• Birthplace: Bunnell, Florida

Dancer, choreographer, and activist

Jones has played an important role in the evolution of modern dance, exploring the possibilities of dance as a communicative medium. His choreography and performance elucidate the African American heritage and experience while at the same time addressing the complexity of living for all people.

Areas of achievement: Dance; Social issues

Early Life

William Tass Jones was born on February 15, 1952, in Bunnell, Florida, to Gus Jones and Estella Lucivee Walden Jones. He grew up in a large family that included his parents, ten children, and his grandmother Anna Edwards. In 1948, his father had become a contractor of migrant workers, and the family traveled along the East Coast following the harvest of various crops. In 1955, having determined that there was enough agricultural work year-round in the area, Jones’s father moved the family to Wayland, New York. There he set up a camp where he housed agricultural workers.

During Jones’s childhood, dance and performance—spontaneous and filled with improvisation—were an important element of daily life. He attended the Wayland public schools, where he participated in sports and school plays. Playing Marcellus in a production of The Music Man, he created his own dance routine. After graduating from Wayland High School, Jones attended the State University of New York at Binghamton as a special admissions student. At Binghamton, he discovered dance as an art form and met Arnie Zane, with whom he would share a seventeen-year personal and professional relationship. In 1971, he went to Amsterdam with Zane with the intention of not coming back to the United States; one year later they returned.

Life’s Work

Dance became the focus of Jones’s life, and Zane joined him in his quest to become a dancer and choreographer. However, the discipline and restrictive atmosphere of formal dance classes, whether classical ballet or modern, did not provide Jones what he sought from the art. In 1973, Jones and Zane again left the university at Binghamton. This time they went to San Francisco, where Jones’s family had moved. One year later, they returned to New York to join the American Dance Asylum, a nontraditional dance group interested in experimentation and innovation. The Dance Asylum was well suited to Jones’s talents and ideas of what dance could and should express. In 1974, he choreographed The Track Dance, his first dance for a large group, and in 1977, he made his first in appearance in New York City in Everybody Works, which he also choreographed.

From 1977 to 1982, Jones and Zane choreographed and performed numerous duets, including the very successful Rotary Action in 1982. That year they founded Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane and Company (later called Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company). The company’s first performance was at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in collaboration with drummer Max Roach. The dance, titled Intuitive Moment, was choreographed by Jones and Zane. In 1985, the company premiered Freedom of Information in Paris. Its success resulted in a 1986 tour of Asia for the company sponsored by the United States Information Agency.

In 1988, Zane died from human immunodeficiency virus (HIV); Jones also had tested positive. Jones continued as a dancer and choreographer, translating his grief and fears into innovative and influential dances. In these works, he combined dance with spoken text, visual images, and sound in ways that enlarged the scope of dance. These works include D-Man in the Water, Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land, Last Night on Earth, and Still/Here. In 2008, he choreographed FELA, based on the work of the Nigerian singer Fela Kuti (1938–97), and, in 2009, Fondly Do We Hope…Fervently Do We Pray.

In addition to choreographing well over one hundred works for his company, Jones has choreographed dances for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Boston Ballet, Berlin Opera Ballet, and Lyon Opera Ballet. He also has appeared in film and on television. Jones has received numerous awards and honors for his contributions to choreography and dance, including a Creative Artists Public Service Award in Choreography (1979), recognition as one of “America’s Irreplaceable Dance Treasures” by the Dance Heritage Coalition (2000), two Tony Awards, induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2009), and a Kennedy Center Honor (2010). In 2011 he received the YoungArts Arison Award, and in 2014 President Barack Obama presented him with a 2013 National Medal of Arts.

Jones continued to choreograph and stage works with his company in the late 2010s and early 2020s. In November 2015, Jones's “A Letter to My Nephew,” a multimedia production about his nephew Lance T. Briggs (1970–2021), who had been critically ill, premiered in Douai, France. Jones's Analogy/Trilogy (2015–17), comprises “Analogy: Dora/Tremontane,” about his mother-in-law's experiences as a nurse and social worker in France during World War II; “Analogy/Lance: Pretty aka The Escape Artist,” about his nephew; and “Analogy/Ambros: The Emigrant,” inspired by novels written by W. G. Sebald, a twentieth-century German writer. Jones's other works of this period include Deep Blue Sea (2020), commissioned by Park Avenue Armory, and Loneliness: Alone as a State of Being (2021). In July 2021, a documentary about Jones and his 1989 dance D-Man in the Waters, Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters, had its world premier. The film by Rosalynde LeBlanc and Tom Hurwitz, follows a group of dancers as they bring a new production of D-Man, to the stage. Jones created the dance in response to the AIDS epidemic and Zane's death in 1988.

Jones met his husband and collaborator, the artist Bjorn Amelan, in 1992.

Significance

Jones is one of the most significant creators of modern dance of his generation. Through dance, he addresses issues of self-understanding, death, sexual identity, and human interaction and makes the art of dancing a form of communication. He also uses dance as a vehicle to recount the history of African Americans and to share this heritage with the world.

Bibliography

Albright, Ann Cooper. Choreographing Difference: The Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1997. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 23 Mar. 2016.

Desmond, Jane C., ed. Dancing Desires: Choreographing Sexualities On and Off the Stage. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2001. Print.

Foster, Susan Leigh. Dances That Describe Themselves: The Improvised Choreography of Richard Bull. Middletown.: Wesleyan UP, 2002. Print.

Jones, Bill T., and Peggy Gillespie. Last Night on Earth. New York: Pantheon, 1995. Print.

Zimmer, Elizabeth, and Susan Quasha, eds. Body Against Body: The Dance and Other Collaborations of Bill T. Jones & Arnie Zane. New York: Station Hill Press, 1989. Print.