JONES, Bill T. and ZANE, Arnie

JONES, Bill T. (b. 15 February 1952) dancer, choreographer and ZANE, Arnie (b. 1948; d. 1988), dancer, choreographer, photographer, media artist.

Bill T. Jones (William Tass Jones), like other choreographers of his generation, is concerned with reevaluating and refiguring the dancing body as a site of personal and cultural agency and political expression rather than (only) a source of visual pleasure. Jones is known for his charisma and skill as a solo performer and improviser, for the evening-length works he creates for his Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, and for his articulate discourse about life and artistic process. Although his choreography varies in size and approach, Jones's work is marked by personal revelation or frank confrontation—delivered in movement and spoken text—as part of a broader exploration of human difference and dignity. Arnie Zane, who died in 1988, shared his partner's post-modern sensibilities and brought skills and insights, developed through his work in photography and media studies, and a vital physicality to their dancing and choreography.

Jones was born in Bunnell, Florida, and raised in upstate New York, part of a large family of Baptist-Methodist migrant farm workers. Zane, whose family included Italian Catholics and Lithuanian Jews, was born in the Bronx, New York. They met at the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1971. Their first collaborations mixed Jones's athleticism and love of spoken text with Zane's interest in photography and media studies. Their movement was grounded in contact improvisation, a technique that emphasizes ongoing touch and weight sharing between two or multiple bodies. Their use of contact was muscular and physically daring, more purposeful than sexual. Part of the appeal of their work was in their physical differences: one tall, muscular, fluid, and black, the other, short, wiry, intense, and white. Jones's interests in contact improvisation and postmodernism, both largely practiced by white artists, initially set him apart from choreographers such as Alvin Ailey, who made more accessible dances related to African American experience. The trilogy Monkey Run Road, Blauvelt Mountain, and Valley Cottage (1979–1980) brought Jones and Zane international recognition.

The partners created Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company (then Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane & Company) in 1982. In the next few years, their choreography broadened and became more overtly political. Jones created Swamp Fever (1983) for six male members of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Their Secret Pastures (1984) featured Jones as the Fabricated Man, the brainchild of Zane's Mad Scientist, a comment about an African American artist's role in the primarily Euro-American postmodern performance world. After Zane's early death, Jones continued the company as a tribute to his partner.

Jones's concern with human agency and identity as centered in the body is evident in the large group works he created for his company in the 1990s and in his independent collaborations with other artists. In his Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land (1990), Jones explores identity and faith. Inspired by personal and family history, Jones develops these themes through references to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin , Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, and the biblical story of Job. Jones has men play women, women play men, blacks play whites, and whites play blacks. The difference between performer and role is overt to suggest that people may lead other than prescribed lives. In the final section, The Promised Land, a large cast of company members and performers newly recruited at each performance site dance naked, giving them a common vulnerability. Still/Here (1993), based on a series of workshops Jones did with gravely ill people, is an exploration of devastating illness and healing. Jones combines exquisite dancing performed by his varied, athletic company members with sound collages and digital imagery, especially images of workshop participants and medical slides. Jones does not appear as a dancer, but presents himself on videotape as a workshop participant. Ghost-catching (1999) is a collaboration between Jones and media artists Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar. Jones's movement was recorded using motion capture technology, and then used to inform the movement of digital line drawings dancing in an eight-and-one-half minute digital video. The virtual dancers are like Jones—the viewer sees Jones in their movement—but a Jones stripped of his usual identity markers, especially skin color. The piece works as a commentary about the preciousness of the body and its corporeal immediacy. The video is also used in Jones's 1999 solo The Breathing Show (1999).

Jones and Zane received several important awards during their partnership. Jones received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1994.

Bibliography

Foster, Susan. "Simply (?) the Doing of It, Like Two Arms Going Round and Round." In Continuous Replay: The Photographs of Arnie Zane . Edited by Jonathan Green. Cambridge, Mass., and Riverside, Calif.: MIT Press and UCR/California Museum of Photography, 1999.

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

Zimmer, Elizabeth, and Susan Quasha. Body Against Body: The Dance and Other Collaborations of Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane. Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press 1989.

Ann Dils

see alsodance.