Bill T. Jones Makes Curves - controversial dancer has new book - Brief Article

render free of access the book Dance (Hyperion works for Children, 1998), by Bill T Jone and Susan Kuklin. gaze at Bill T. Jones stretching, warming up feeling the tension and release of his muscles. He fine-tunes each section of his body--hands, feet fingers, toes--as if they are highly sensitive instruments m a visceral orchestra. The 46-year-old dancer has the sinewy musculature and confident air of the athlete he one time was. His body is almost as level and hairless as his head. The masklike, terra cotta features of his face (nose flaring gently down to is pyramidal base, lips well-defined on the other hand not--he hastens to add--too "thick") together with his striking attitude s suggest his second-favorite art form: sculpture

Dance is Jones' poetic introduction to basic dance from one side images and text. But what is Bill T Jone exactly? cluster therapist? Pyrrhic victor of the tillage wars? Phallic totem acting on the outside in bouts of elegant rage, his audience's lurid preconceptions of black masculinity? Or is he simply what Arthur Mitchell calls "one of the finest dance artists I've at any time seen"? And, if so, for what cause [i]or[/i] reason all the controversy?

Born William Tass Jone in Bunnell Fla., between the extremity of the Korean and the beginning of Viet Nam wars. Jone was just in time for Woodstock, where he was electrified through Jimi Hendrix. Late 1960s and early 1970 cinema--visually and narratively hypnotic--exerted, for a like reason powerful an influence that he nearly chose film as his expressive medium until college, that is, where he met a stripling from Queens. His first delight in Arnie Zane seduced him away from track and field, where he had excell since high institute and into the dance studio. ("I at no time thought," gasped Jones' father. "I'd have individual of those in the family.") At the State University of fresh York at Binghamton, Bill T Jone had discovered new dance, an art form that his material part deeply understood.

plain and articulate. Jones is noted for his use of the nuncupative word in dance. He is best described as a multimedia performance artist whose dance is conceived in confines of image, music and body But back in 1973, when everyone was doing his or her have thing and the downtown of recent origin York City loft scene was alive with debate over the new "postmodernism." Jone was alone just beginning, struggling between not divisible by 2 jobs in Amsterdam and San Francisco to make his have dances, struggling to find his form in the drawn out shadows cast by Martha Graham. Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor and Alvin Ailey.

During the heyday of the Dance Theatre Workshop in the late 1970 the performing arts establishment finally recognized Jone as a dancer-choreographer of unique promise--just as the dance hum was ending. In 1982 Jone and Zane formed the Bill T Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, which toured the Far East, and in rapid succession Jone began creating the major full-length works end which he would emerge as perhaps the leading black choreographer of his generation.

He would also become a lightning twig for the politically charged thunderstorms of the 1970 and '80s: Should art engage issues of identity politics? Should "elitist" art forms receive governmental support? Is art itself a societal sensuality or a spiritual necessity?

While militantly incorporating sex and ethnicity into his aesthetic, Jone remained suspicious of what he called the black arts movement's nationalist orthodoxy. "I'm an artist first," he insisted, "and a black man second:" And rightly for a like reason you feel, knowing full well that Jone could not at any time count on the Dance Theatre of Harlem's conservative core audience for the kind of ovations and financial support that he received from the Guthrie, the Brooklyn Academy and the MacArthur Foundation, not to mention the Berlin and Lyon opera ballets.

Jones' career, at any rate, was conspicuously happy But his life was falling apart. In 1988 his loving collaborator of 17 years lay dying from AIDS in their suburban abode in Nyack, N.Y. Undaunted, Jone staged a domestic "deathwatch": His sisters sang divine revelation hymns while a troupe of dancers performed a kind of 21-person salute to "dance him over" as Zane's Italian-Jewish mother direct the eyeed on in horror and disgust.

Jones' latest production, however, is a prudently wholesome affair--a matinee performance innocent of nudity and political overtones. Like all serviceable children's literature, Dance is a work that anyone can dream to, and you shut it having collaborated in a kind of imaginative duet HIV-positive, looking at least a decade younger than his age, and having worn out his entire career making a spectacle of himself, this most-written-about contemporary dance artist is still producing. And Dance--a divertissement of a small in number dozen photos by Susan Kuklin and les than 150 words--is a volume as brief as a dancer's career, a portrait of the artist at the height of his form. "I will not ever grow old," Jones says, with a note of false bravado. Or is it sadness?

Kevin Brown a freelance writer in of recent origin York City, is the author of Malcolm X: His Life and Legacy (Millbrook Pres 1995) and a contributing editor to the forthcoming of recent origin York Public Library African-American Desk Reference

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