General Gay & Lesbian Biographies, Dancers & Choreographers - Biography, AIDS Patients - Biography, African American General Biography
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Overview
Born in Bunnell, Florida, in 1952, the tenth of twelve children in a migrant worker's family, Bill T. Jones spent his early years traveling up and down the East Coast with his parents as they followed the crop seasons. In 1959 they settled in upstate New York, and it was there - singing rounds in dusty tractor yards and watching grown-ups from the shadows of the juke joint - that Jones began his life in dance. Jones has continued to choreograph and dance, and in Last Night on Earth he documents the creation of several of his pieces, including Absence, Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land, Last Night on Earth, and Still/Here. Jones illuminates the process through which his work has become a way of expressing profound emotion; of exploring ideas around memory, sexuality, race, and mortality; of imposing order and beauty on chaos and despair. And in so doing, he shows dance to be not only a sequence of beautiful movements on a stage, but also an instrument of survival.Honesty, dignity, passion, and moral conviction are the hallmarks of the art of internationally renowned choreographer and dancer Bill T. Jones. In this extraordinary book--equal parts reminiscence, reflection, and performance--Jones charts his dance's origins and development in the context of his remarkable life. Photos.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
African American choreographer and dancer Jones challenges audiences' expectations about race, sex and politics in provocative avant-garde compositions dealing with racism, homophobia, AIDS, interracial romance-subjects he knows firsthand. In 1988, Jones's longtime lover and collaborator, Arnie Zane, who was white and Jewish, died of AIDS. Jones, diagnosed as HIV-positive in 1985, remains asymptomatic but is driven by a sense of urgency. Writing with freelancer Gillespie, he describes the ``survival workshops'' he has conducted and videotaped around the country for people coping with life-threatening illnesses; this provided the raw material for his multimedia dance Still/Here. The son of migrant field-workers who left rural Florida in 1955 to settle in a nearly all-white upstate New York town when he was three, Jones writes affectingly of his boyhood, his bohemian years in Amsterdam and San Francisco, his struggle for artistic identity and his creative work in New York City as director of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. This is an eloquent and moving autobiography. Photos. (Sept.)Library Journal
This autobiography takes its title from a recent work by Jones, an artist Time magazine has called "the most versatile and inventive of America's black choreographers" (October 10, 1994). More recently, his "Still/Here," an evening-length work consisting of dance, vocals, and video images partially derived from "survival workshops" that Jones conducted with groups of terminally ill people, became the focal point of a critical New Yorker essay about "victim art." None of this acclaim, controversy, and confrontation is new to Jones; many of his works include autobiographical elements, often quite frank. Jones's performing ethos centers around depicting moral issues and social ills as well as a sense of redemption and spiritual growth. This book is like one of those performances: Jones is the focal point, and he writes about the most personal details and experiences. In a recent New York Time Magazine feature, Elizabeth Kaye described "Jones's confrontational attitude toward an audience that he is determined to captivate, educate, agitate, trouble, bond with, and incense" (March 6, 1994). He displays that same attitude toward the reader of his autobiography. Recommended for dance and gay studies collections. (Photos not seen.)-Carolyn M. Mulac, Chicago P.L.Book Details
Published
April 1, 1997
Publisher
Pantheon Books
Pages
304
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780679774372