In Part Two of Analogy: A Trilogy, we meet Lance, whose battles with his own personal demons-drugs and excess-exposes us to another type of war. It was the battlefield of the nightlife and underworld of the late 80s and early 90s club culture and sex trade. This “pretty boy-gangster thug”, a name he acquired in prison, holds steadfast to his often tragic and sometimes outrageously humorous narrative, while...
“Memory, often strikes me as a kind of dumbness. It makes one’s head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down on the earth from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds.” –W.G.Sebald
tra-mon-tane adjective \trə-ˈmän-ˌtān, ˌtra-mən-ˈ\ 1. traveling to, situated on, or living on the other...
“Jones and collaborators amaze with their scope and with the engaging quality of the multi media woven seamlessly into the work”-The News & Observer
Bill T. Jones with Associate Artistic Director, Janet Wong and his company created the Analogy Trilogy over the course of four years. It is an investigation of memory, storytelling and form.
One should view the Trilogy through relaxation and acuity, as a spectator of a...
Director and choreographer Bill T. Jones – whose major honors include a MacArthur “Genius” Award, the Kennedy Center Honors and two Tony Awards for Best Choreography – returns to the stage at the center of an acclaimed new work for his renowned company. Inspired by legendary artist and composer John Cage’s Indeterminacy, a performance of ninety one-minute stories interrupted by a chance musical score, Jones creates a collage of...
Performed with live musicians*, Play and Play: An Evening of Movement and Music applies Jones’s inventive choreography to some of the most important Western musical works of our time. Featuring compositions by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Ravel or Schubert this program highlights the joy of musicians and dancers working together.
Program A
D-Man in the Waters (1989)
“In a dream you saw a way to survive and you were full of...
A Letter to My Nephew, Bill T. Jones’ latest dance theater work, is an intimate, impressionistic collage for nine dancers, setting a portrait of Jones’s beloved nephew Lance T. Briggs—a talented dancer who struggled with illness and addiction—against the political landscape of the present. Composed like a series of postcards sent home, A Letter to My Nephew launches a swirl of images around Briggs––a vogue ball, a breathtaking vista,...
In this celebration of milestones, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and SITI Company celebrate their combined 50 years of artistic achievements with the centennial of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.
In A Rite, dancers and actors alike burst onto to the stage feet stomping, knees quivering – a complex and knowing homage to Nijinsky’s original “Sacrificial Maiden” choreographic motif – to the beat of drums and...
“A richly textured and layered theatrical adventure” – The New York Times
How do we human beings live together? How do we co-exist with others who may be close to us, yet so very different from ourselves? How do we live with those not only in our own household, but in our neighborhood, our city, our country and our ever-fracturing planet?
In A Quarreling Pair, Bill T. Jones explores the dualities between any two people and...
“If we insist on telling the same stories again and again… we will become that.” — Bill T. Jones
In Another Evening: I Bow Down, Bill T. Jones reveals how personal stories and historical events converge, in an examination of the resilience of the human spirit in the face of disaster. Known for taking risks on stage, Bill T. Jones continues to push the boundaries of modern dance through unconventional...
Celebrated as a masterful and magnetic soloist, Bill T. Jones, building on the success of his last solo work, The Breathing Show (1999), creates an eclectic new evening-length production: As I Was Saying… Comprised from three different works, it typifies Jones’ characteristic blend of wit and poignancy. The evening is built on modularity that allows Jones to recombine various dances such as:
With the Good Lord: A response to “The...
In the hands of choreographer Bill T. Jones, dance becomes an extraordinary tool for probing life’s big questions and journeying toward understanding. In this new evening-length work, Blind Date explores patriotism, honor, sacrifice, and service to a cause larger than oneself-values all but lost in our modern world. Jones’s technically stunning 10-member company performs in a sensory landscape of primary colors, video imagery, and musical influences from around the...
Bill T. Jones sees Chapel/Chapter in its present form as the beginning of an investigation. As always, the work is proceeding from a set of questions. For Jones the lead question might be, “How can this event suggest the uneasy distance our mediatized era helps create between the passive observers which we are and the disturbing, sometimes incomprehensible ‘news items’ we encounter every day. At this stage of his...
Continuing his tradition of thought-provoking work, Bill T. Jones commemorates the Abraham Lincoln bicentennial with a production exploring the life and legacy of this complex figure. Commissioned by Chicago’s Ravinia Festival, the dance-theater evening features the sophisticated movement of his diverse dancers accompanied by an original score for cello, guitar, piano and voice, performed live. The films of Janet Wong fill a striking, modern stage design while the conflicts...
Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land
First performed at the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in Brooklyn, New York
choreographed by Bill T. Jones
music by Julius Hemphill
text by R. Justice Allen, Ann T. Greene, Jones, Estella Jones, Heidi Latsky, and Soujourner Truth
set/costumes by Huck Snyder
lighting by Robert Wierzel
Photo by Jeff Day
One of three works that grew from Bill T. Jones’ interest in Abraham Lincoln, Serenade/The Proposition is described as his first attempt to grapple with issues of historical weight using the tools of dance and theater. What results is a spirited and lyrical sixty-minute production that moves gracefully from images and texts of early America to contemporary ideas of identity and belonging described in the dancers’ own words. What does...
Still/Here explores and contemplates survival, life and art through dance and music. Still/Here is a two-act, evening-length dance-theater piece (premiered 1994) with a visual score made from edited interviews with people who were or are facing life-threatening illnesses.
Choreographed by Bill T. Jones
First performed at the Biennale Internationale de la Danse in Lyon, France
Music by Kenneth Frazelle (traditionals by Odetta, the Lark String Quartet and Bill Finizio) and...
