Fancy Footwork: Dance maverick Bill T. Jones brings 11-member company to Ham Hall

Tuesday, April 12, 2005 | 8:40 a.m.

Despite award-winning choreography, brilliant artistry and efforts to break racial, religious and sexual stereotyping, Bill T. Jones himself has been labeled.

Dubbed by critics as a controversial, sociopolitical activist - as a dancer on a soap box - Jones is known by many as a political provocateur.

But the choreographer, now 53 and trying to turn his innovative modern dance company into an institution, said he never set out for that title.

"It seems strange after 30 years to have this echoed," said Jones, whose 11-member Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company will perform Friday at UNLVs Ham Hall.

"I was never thinking that way. I was making poetry out of what I knew. I was trying to make poetry out of life."

In doing so, Jones, who is black employs jarring language, using the word "nigger" during the interview for this story and in one of his productions.

Jones has been making audiences question the way they see the world ever since the day he and Zane, his Jewish and Italian short-in-stature partner, lifted him (a tall, muscular man) during a duet onstage.

Through cutting-edge performances set to music, text and even silence, Jones has brought race, religion, sexual orientation and gender to the dance stage over the past few decades.

Dedicated to diversity of all types, he has incorporated such oversized dancers as the 300-pound Larry Goldhuber and the fleshy Alexandra Beller into his company of otherwise hard-bodied performers, and addressed HIV in a performance about terminal illness.

"My work is always trying to talk about humanity," said Jones, this year's recipient for the prestigious Samuel H. Scripps/American Dance Festival Award.

"In my own way, I am asking us to reconsider what we think we understand about the world."

We see this in one of Jones' longer productions, "Reading, Mercy and the Artificial Nigger," which includes his diverse cast playing the roles of a white grandfather and grandson -- two backwoods Georgians -- who take a trip to Atlanta, where the grandfather hopes the sin of the city, particularly its black population, will instill in the child a sense of small-town, white pride.

The work is based on Flannery O'Connor's 1957 story "Artificial Nigger," a title that stopped Jones in his tracks.

"I thought, 'How can I take my company, which is all about diversity, put it into the 1950s and introduce us into that world?' " Jones said.

The result is a performance in which O'Connor's story is read while dancers -- tall and short, black, white, Asian, male and female -- perform as the characters.

"Rather than rail against what was written, I thought I would introduce my world and see if there was anything to gain from it," Jones said. "It's one artist paying homage to another artist, but there's something about hearing language that has (the term) nigger and white people on a stage that is really opposite of that. I tried to do my story color blind and gender blind.

"Do you see any niggers on that stage? I don't think so."

Socially conscious

It's not like Jones to ignore the world around him, to not address social issues.

But, he said, "I don't think an artist has to blatantly approach those issues in their work.

"There are some who will say that all art, even abstract art, is a revolt against sloppy thinking."

Today, Jones is working to move his company into a permanent home in upper Manhattan, work with his board and create permanence. Rather than small venues, his company performs to larger audiences, some of which might have never seen modern dance.

Jones and Zane, partners in life and work, formed the company in 1982 after 11 years of collaborating. When Zane died in 1988 of an HIV-related illness, Jones, in trying to find his own voice, created "Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land." That piece was followed four years later by the controversial piece on terminal illness, "Still Here."

The company's 15-member board of directors includes poet Maya Angelou, contemporary artist Cindy Sherman and writer/activist Gloria Steinem.

"The company was the child that Arnie and I made, a commitment to take care of that," Jones said. "I'm fighting every day to keep it alive, to continue it. Legacy is something I'm dealing with the board all the time, taking it to another level of stability."

Ten years ago when Jones had thought about leaving dance, he turned to Trisha Brown to rework his style. Last weekend he collaborated with Brown for a multimedia production, " '21' Becomes '22,' " in Tempe, Ariz. But normally, Jones said, he has to make a concerted effort to get himself onstage.

This weekend's stop in Las Vegas is part of his company's 20th-anniversary tour, "Phantom Project."

The performance includes "Duet," "Power/Full" and "Mercy 10 x 8 On a Circle," a distillation of "Reading, Mercy and the Artificial Nigger" in which the movement from "Reading" is extracted and placed with Mozart's 32 variations on a theme using five couples.

"Floating the Tongue," which Jones first performed at the Kent School for Boys in Connecticut, presents dancers as thinkers in four phases. A dancer improvises a phrase, sets the phrase, then performs the movement purely as she reports what she is doing. The fourth phase in which the dancer's thoughts morph, movement changes and thinking follows.

"My point is that when you're doing movement, the brain does not stop," Jones said. "It's an intriguing piece."

When asked about the Samuel H. Scripps/American Dance Festival Award, which includes Martha Graham, Twyla Tharp and Merce Cunningham as past recipients, Jones softened his voice and said humbly, "That is so touching to be included on such a wonderful roster of dancers."

Jones has been collaborating with digital artists Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar to further unite technology and dance on the stage, and in May will perform a solo piece set to the music of Bach in Milan at the Duomo Cathedral, the world's largest Gothic cathedral. Taking an interest in theater, Jones is working on two off-Broadway productions. And decades after Brown v. Board of Education and Stonewall, there is still plenty left for the choreographer to talk about.

"I don't feel comfortable. I don't feel settled," Jones said. "I don't see why people are so surprised that someone like me exists. In the prisons now 62 percent of the prisoners are black and Hispanic. There's a huge underclass of people who have not made it to the middle class. We can see how homosexuality has been used in the last election.

"I don't want to preach to you. I don't want to tell you how you should be. I'm saying, 'Come watch how it should be.' "