Bill T. Jones: Moving, Writing, Speaking

In January 2002 we went to a performance by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and the Orion String Quartet at Lincoln Center. It would be an understatement to say that we were blown away. Less than four months had passed since 9/11 and we were anxious for art that would explain the new landscape that had replaced the Manhattan skyline. Verbum (2002). World Without/In (2002). Black Suzanne (2002). We were instantly moved and transformed by this program; it was exactly what we had been hungering for. Neither of us could get the performance or Jones out of our minds, and we talked about both endlessly in the weeks that followed.

At the time we were both teaching an undergraduate course at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts called Art and the World, and, like many of our colleagues, we had frequently referred to Jones's work and its critical reception in our classrooms. We had done so not only because we were always moved by Jones's engagement with the most profound artistic and social issues of the late 20th century, but also because, by introducing Jones's work into the classroom, we were then able to use it as a model for helping students understand the rich complexity of thought, history, and social commitment at the center of his choreography. We used Jones's work in the classroom in hopes that it would inspire students to look for the complexity and paradox within their own artistic production.

Shortly after the performance at Lincoln Center, we invited Jones to participate in a public interview with us and the Tisch student body, explaining to him that we were interested in beginning a dialogue about how to talk about and "see" his work. As writers and movement practitioners of various schools of thought from the Graham technique to yoga and the Judson School, we were particularly interested in having a conversation with Jones about the shape of his most recent work. We were—and are—often surprised at how tenuous, how standoff-ish, and even uninformed many reviewers at major newspapers like the New York Times still seemed to be regarding the nuts-and-bolts impact of works like The Table Project (2001), World Without/In, and Black Suzanne. As perhaps the most important artist of our time, we argued that Jones's work always seems to have its finger on the pulse of larger debates and movements (corporeal, political, aesthetic) that are taking place within the landscape of American culture. Jones's work, we reminded ourselves, is remarkably "still here" in its willingness to challenge audiences and critics.

The interview took place on 20 March 2002 at NYU's Frederick Loewe Theatre. It was a stormy night, yet the auditorium was packed with close to 300 people, most of them undergraduates. Jones's presence electrified the group and left the students with a tangible model for how to begin to think about what it means to be a young artist entrusted with the responsibility of creating work in a world that is plagued by ideological and political divides.

JONES:

Would you two mind if I read something before we start? It's from Last Night on Earth; you probably know it very well. The last time I read this, I was so nervous and so upset. It was at the Dance Critics Association (DCA) Conference in Pittsburgh at the peak of the notorious Still/Here controversy. I was invited to come and address them and I had never been so undone and so I read this as a way to talk about writers.

DENT:

Still/Here is a piece that elicited tremendous criticism that in many ways seemed unexpected.

JONES:

You're right. I had already made a reputation of doing outrageous things in performance. Mind you, we could talk about what makes outrageous. One man's outrageous is another man's spontaneously unguarded expression. I don't know which one I was playing exactly. So I had made pieces like that—Uncle Tom...