Will the Real Bill T. Jones Please Stand Up?

Bill T. Jones is an African American whose choreographic roots are in the largely white postmodern dance of the 1970s and '80s. Perhaps more than any other choreographer of his time, he has held up his ethnicity, his sexuality, his politics, and his aesthetic ideology to public scrutiny in an often-conflicting voyeuristic construction of himself.

As Gay Morris aptly points out, Jones has never been a choreographer whose art and life could be separated (Morris 2001:255).¹ My discussion draws heavily from biographical material, Jones's own words in interviews, and examples from his works to illustrate how this controversial person has, by his extraordinary persistence and talent, privileged insightful and unique readings of self, art, and society in his work.

Jones: Defining Self, Transcending Category

In the 1980s, Jones's artistic trope fit well with the zeitgeist of relativism and pluralism prevalent in New York's downtown dance scene. Individual narratives began to trump hegemonic concepts of race and gender on the one hand and intellectual analytical approaches to dance on the other. Indeed, Jones helped to shape those times by marking his own aesthetic and political territory, negotiating a dichotomous world of black and white, aggressive and passive, gay and straight. Both outspoken and ambivalent about being a black homosexual postmodern dancer and choreographer, Jones invokes a Janus-like figure, challenging himself to please stand up, fighting over which "Bill T." will prevail, and playing out this conflict in his choreography as well as in his public statements.

Jones describes himself as a sensitive child—he recalls being branded a "sissy boy" by some members of his large close-knit family of eleven siblings, seven of them brothers (Jones with Gillespie 1995:37). In a 1994 interview with Henry Louis Gates, the choreographer gives a startlingly intimate account of being sexually aroused by an older brother and the utter shame he felt. This, he deduces, is what led him to prefer white men sexually: for him, a safe place as opposed to the raw foreboding fantasy of committing "incest" with another black man (Gates 2002:116). Over the past two decades, Jones has drawn inspiration for his work from disparate parts of his cultural and familial background. His parents, Augustus and Estella, were migrant workers who moved the family when Jones was a young boy to Wayland, a predominately white community in upstate New York. Jones's parents worked hard, believed in the American Dream, voted for Eisenhower, meted out tough-love discipline (especially his mother, Estella), and maintained strong Christian values. As a youngster, Bill liked to read and run track. And being aware of his considerable speaking skills, he thought he would major in English or drama; a family friend once predicted he'd become a preacher. In his biography, Jones tells of his formative years in the 1960s in Wayland when he was acutely aware of white values, learning to speak and act like white people at school and returning home to resume his family's black ways of speaking and acting. "I could—in fact, had to—go into their 'white drag,' although they could never come into mine" (Jones with Gillespie 1995:43). Jones, referring to the '50s television show Leave It to Beaver, states, "Surely, Estella was not June Cleaver and I loved her as she was. And yet I also loved the politeness shared by white parents and children when they addressed one another" (Jones with Gillespie 1995:43). This idealized image of the perfect family clearly foreshadows Jones's battle with his moral and social identity as well as his anger at having to wage it.

1.

Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, 1982 studio portrait of Valley Cottage. (Photo © Lois Greenfield; courtesy of Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company)

Jones's artistic influences range from the dramatic imagery of Martha Graham, to James Baldwin, to Arthur Mitchell's success as a black ballet dancer. Jones's transition into manhood and independence coincided with the tail-end of the Woodstock hippie, pot-smoking days of the...