Story/Time @ Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Becket, MA
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 in a new work for his renowned company. Inspired by legendary artist and composer John Cage’s Indeterminacy, a performance of seventy one-minute stories, Jones creates a landscape of dance, music, and story, arranged anew for each performance by chance procedure. Story/Time finds Jones engaging in the time-honored art of storytelling while also questioning the structure of the form. Mentored by Cage’s modernist approach, randomness and structure trump the taste and personality of the artist to create a unique event that reflects on the relentless passage of time and our memory of it. Original music composed by Ted Coffey will accompany the diverse company of dancers.
Co-commissioned by Peak Performances @ Montclair State (NJ) and the Walker Art Center.
Developed in residence at Arizona State University Gammage Auditorium, Bard College, Alexander Kasser Theater at Montclair State University, University of Virginia, and the Walker Art Center.
Story/Time is made possible with lead support from the Company’s commissioning program, “Partners in Creation,” which includes the following donors: the Argosy Foundation, Abigail Congdon and Joe Azrack, Anne Delaney, Eleanor Friedman, Barbara and Eric Dobkin, Sandra and Gerald Eskin, Ruth and Stephen Hendel, Ellen Poss, Jane Bovingdon Semel and Terry Semel.
Funded in part by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project (NDP), with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and additional funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Boeing Company Charitable Trust.
