Bill T. Jones.

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.

His tendency to seek out and encourage creative individuals, rather than merely technically proficient performers, attracts dancers who, after years with him, form ensembles of their own. Among these are Heidi Latsky, Sean Curran, Arthur Aviles, Larry Goldhuber, Andrea E. Woods, and Alexandra Beller. "There's a secret satisfaction," says Jones, "in watching them struggle with the personalities, the fund-raising. They realize just how hard it was, when you were yelling at them. The relationship changes."

HE WANTED SELF-starters, creative problem-solvers," says Curran, who joined the troupe in 1983, right after graduating from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. Jones had made a piece for Curran's graduation concert and then asked him to apprentice. Curran began learning Zane's parts. "There was something about the urgency of making work that we all picked up," he says. "There was a huge difference in process between the two partners, and we dancers learned from both of them. Bill was known for being passionate. He had the idea that the work could change the world, could make sense of a chaotic universe."

Latsky, a native of Montreal, started as a jazz dancer at 20; when she joined Jones and Zane's troupe she was 28, and a veteran of a couple of episodes of Fame. "I was challenged by his high standard," she remembers, "which was almost always beyond my grasp. Bill said, 'Be a leader.'"

She stayed for seven years, leaving to begin her own creative experiments in 1993, and working on duets with Goldhuber, who weighs about three times what she does. "Larry and I certainly evolved out of Bill and Arnie: a really mismatched duet team," she observes. Now sire has her own troupe. "I want the audience to be on the edge of their seats because we're doing something no one else can do That's what I got from Bill. In his process, we had to make stuff. He gave me problems to solve. All of a sudden I found my power, moving from an emotional impulse. It was very cathartic. We gave it everything, emotionally, intellectually. A lot of his process got into our systems. Today, dancers are more into what they can get than into the process."

Though she struggled with Jones for years, she treasures the experience. "It was invaluable; some of the best years of my life, in spite of him and because of him. He's intelligent, sophisticated. His voice is so strong. He's not afraid to take risks, is constantly questioning, constantly evolving--and that's what I do. The more I work, the more I appreciate his craft."

Woods spent seven years in the troupe, beginning in 1989; she's gone on to form Souloworks. "When I started working with Bill," she says, "it was affirming that my black woman's body could represent portions of his work, that I could be exactly who I am. I didn't have to fit into an aesthetic or a sensibility. Bill says he would dream about us."

Aviles, who calls himself a "working-class Latino," joined the troupe right out of Bard College in 1987, stayed eight years, and then started his own company and a nonprofit studio, the Bronx Academy of Art and Dance, in the Hunts Point neighborhood where he grew up (see "Back Home in the Bronx," DANCE MAGAZINE, August 2001, page 61). "Bill was always about the 'multi' thing. He was willing to have a confrontation with the culture at large. I wanted a dialogue with my culture."

BILL T. JONES/ARNIE ZANE DANCE COMPANY has a full schedule for its anniversary season, which began in September with a two-week retrospective at The Kitchen in New York, and continues with a residency at Columbia College in Chicago, a week in France, and a five-day run, featuring the New York premiere of Reading, Mercy, at BAM in February. The tour continues in March in Canada, and in June in, England and Scotland.

Other troupes are showing his work: The Dayton Contemporary Dance Company will bring his and before ... to BAM's Next Wave Festival December 9, 11, and 13.

Longtime collaborator Lois Well Jones and Zanes's first contact improvisation teacher in Binghamton in the 1970s, and now artistic director of both 171 Cedar Arts Center in Coming, New York, and The Yard, a colony for dancers on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts, reflects on her period of collaboration with them.

"When Bill T. Jones, Arnie Zane, and I were dancing as the American Dance Asylum, Bill pushed relentlessly for the most rigorous investigation of the material. Suspicious of easy solutions, he has the intellectual and physical strength to wrestle long and hard with difficult problems. When others are satisfied with the results of their artistic inquiry, he's still vigorously re-framing the questions. His genius lies in the depth of his commitment to the process of making art."

BILL T. JONES/ARNIE ZANE DANCE COMPANY AT A GLANCE

BILL T. JONES/ARNIE ZANE DANCE COMPANY

853 BROADWAY, SUITE 1706, NEW YORK, NY 10003

212.477.1850; FAX [phone]

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ARTISTIC DIRECTOR: Bill T. Jones

ASSOCIATE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR: Bjorn Amelan

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Julia Blackburn

ASSISTANT TO CHOREOGRAPHER, REHEARSAL DIRECTOR: Janet Wang GENERAL MANAGER: Alison Schwartz

* Annual budget: $2.4 million

* 10 dancers, 2 apprentices, ages 23-32, ranging from 5' 2" to 6' 2" in height

* 35-week contract; non-union company

* Open auditions are scheduled on an as-needed basis, and are posted on the company Web site. Primarily held in New York City.

* Performances use both live and prerecorded music, including commissioned scores. In 2002 the company collaborated with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center for a tour featuring the Orion String Quartet and Chamber Music Society Two.

* Venues: National and international performance spaces ranging from 100-5,000 seats, including Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Kennedy Center, Sadler's Wells (London), Maison de la Dense (Lyon), Het Muziektheater [Amsterdam], and U.S. colleges and universities

* Touring: Nationally and internationally, for an average of twenty weeks yearly. Most tours include master classes and lecture demonstrations.

* No official school

* Outreach: Master classes, community residencies and workshops, lecture-demonstrations, panel discussions, post-performance Q&A discussions, and occasionally, opportunities to collaborate and perform with the company

Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane (who died in 1988) founded their company, which has been described as a fusion of dance and theater, in 1982. Since then, it has performed in more than 130 American cities and 30 countries. The company received New York Dance and Performance Awards for its 1986 season at The Joyce Theater and for the musical scoring and costume design for Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land in 1990 In 1999, it was nominated for the Laurence Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dance. The Dance Heritage Coalition has named Jones (who received a Dance Magazine Award in 1993) one of America's Irreplaceable Dance Treasures in 2000. The company's work has been seen in such documentaries as Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land (on Great Performances), Bill T. Jones: Still/Here with Bill Mayors, I'll Make Me a World: A Century of African American Artists, and the Emmy Award-winning Free to Dance: The Presence of African Americans in Dance. The repertoire of more than seventy-five, works ranges from collaborative historic dances by Zone and Jones to multimedia and community-based projects, to contemporary creations by Jones.

Elizabeth Zimmer is a senior editor at the Village Voice and the author of Body Against Body: Tim Dance and Other Collaborations of Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane. She edited the text of Envisioning Dance for Film and Video, a DVD and collection of essays, recently released in paperback by Routledge.