Curriculum IV: Spin and Spin! Turn! Turn! Turn!

Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company was set to premiere a new work produced by LMCC on September 12, 2001…Now 25 years later, LMCC has invited Bill to make another work in response to our current American moment. Bill T. Jones’s new work Curriculum IV: Spin and Spin! Turn! Turn! Turn! concludes LMCC’s 25th Annual River To River Festival and blends striking choreography and a live original score by acclaimed composer and multidisciplinary artist Samora Pinderhughes to powerfully weave together reflections on loss, love, freedom, and resilience. Jones’s Curriculum series originated in reference to a quote from Cameroonian historian and political theorist Achille Mbembe in a 2018 interview, in which he proposed an archive-expanding “planetary curriculum.” Taking inspiration from this idea, Jones has now created three (and with this, his fourth) Curriculum works colliding formal exploration with urgent contemporary questions. The multi-work pursuit takes a protean approach to asking, as Jones describes, “What does a contemporary progressive person have to know to live and work efficiently and morally in the world today?” 

Jones and Pinderhughes’ collaboration forges an intergenerational bridge as both artists search within themselves and their respective creative interests to meditate on loss, and their distinct responses to the 25-year aftermath of 9/11 and other cataclysms spiralling into our era of loss of freedom, speech, movement, and justice. Together, the two built a playlist, at the heart of which is the ancient teaching embedded in Nina Simone’s warmly gutting rendition of “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season),” Pete Seeger’s twist on the Book of Ecclesiastes. The work’s setting in public space likewise opens it into a reflection not only of two artists’ considerations of our past and present, but that of everyone there looking out from the park “at the aspirational symbol of America,” as Jones describes—the Statue of Liberty.

Jones said, “To respond to this moment in the past when the world stopped, l am looking for a portrait of the external and the internal world of individuals like myself living in contemporary New York trying to be a responsive participant in the world right now. This is the curriculum I’m studying — what does it sound like? What does it move like? I would like to say that the piece wants to be bigger than the bodies that will be my company, that it will be a reflection of what’s seen in the families, speaking every language in the globe, out there by the water looking out at the Statue.”