Bill T. Jones: the master choreographer returns to B.U.

On September 24th the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company will bring a daring, innovative spectacle of dance to the Anderson Center Osterhout Concert Theater. Bill T. Jones, director, choreographer, dancer and social activist, who received the MacArthur Genius Award, who co-created and choreographed Fela, and who is broadly regarded as one of the world’s most influential voices in dance, is coming home to Binghamton.

Born of migrant farm laborers, Mr. Jones grew up in the rural community of Wayland, NY and attended Wayland High School, where a gifted drama teacher recognized and nurtured his talents as a performer. He entered SUNY Binghamton in 1970 with dreams of being an actor, but a particularly dynamic and vibrant dance faculty turned him toward dance.

Certainly not risk averse, Bill T. Jones’ appetite for dance took him from SUNY Binghamton to Amsterdam, to SUNY Brockport and to San Francisco where he, Arnie Zane, Lois Welk and others founded the American Dance Asylum. A need for permanent rehearsal and performance space brought them back to Binghamton, where ADA ultimately found a home in the Abigail Whitney Building on Frederick Street. There Bill T. and Arnie Zane developed duets that would become part of the early repertoire of their company.

Bill T. speaks of Binghamton with love and nostalgia, citing people and places, some of which still stand and others long gone. His was a Binghamton of filmmakers, photographers, painters and musicians, of opportunities to collaborate and space in which to grow. We spoke on August 29th:

ANDY J. HOROWITZ: Bill T. Jones, we have spoken in the past. We know each other through American Dance Asylum. I didn’t quite overlap with you, but I was there in 1982 and was in a piece choreographed by Lois Welk that we took to PS122. Arnie Zane also performed and you were in the audience.

BILL T. JONES: Was Arnie performing in Lois’s piece?

AJH: No, his was a solo called Hand Dance.

BTJ: Now it’s coming back to me. You were a member of The Second Hand Dance Company. I saw you I think a couple of times in Binghamton, and you performed in our space. Did I see you at PS122 as well?

AJH: Yeah, we played PS122 four times. It was early in our careers back in the 90’s or late 80’s. Mark Russell booked us.

BTJ: Right, yes, I remember you guys. It was a very surprising, post Moses Pendleton style. I remember the work was very witty and well made. Anyway, great! What would you like to talk about? Where would you like this conversation to go?

AJH: Well, you’re going to be performing in Binghamton, NY on September 24th and I thought that the readers of Triple Cities Carousel, who I’m representing in this interview, would be particularly interested in your Southern Tier roots. I know that you were a young boy in Wayland, NY.

BTJ: Right. Yes.

AJH: It’s near Hammondsport, isn’t it?

BTJ: Sort of, but when I was a child Hammondsport might as well have been in Buffalo.

AJH: The point is, you were living in a very, very rural place.

BTJ: We were migrant farm laborers. That’s why we were there.

AJH: So how on Earth did it come to you to be a dancer?

BTJ: Well, I don’t think life comes in that way. I think you have a temperament. Let’s put it this way. My parents were ambitious, enterprising Black people and the business that was available to people of their educational level and social position was field work. My dad had an entrepreneurial spirit. He got a couple of trucks and an old bus and put sides on them and tarps and, just like the Grapes of Wrath all over again, he would trundle people up through sometimes six school systems a year including my older brothers and sisters. I’m number ten out of twelve.

AJH: Wow!

BTJ: And because the potato crop was so lucrative at that time in the Steuben County region my Dad made a commitment to be a Black Yankee in 1955. I was the first of the kids who went K through 12 in an integrated school in the north. Thank God for Mary Lee Shapee, a forward-thinking, modern woman who wore many skirts, smoked cigarettes, and let it be known, was an atheist in that conservative, little community. She encouraged me as a theatre person, even letting me direct The Crucible as a senior. I got to dance the Buddy Hackett role in The Music Man, but it was as a solo because it was such a time of tensions around interracial relationships that I couldn’t have had a girl dance with me. I was so jazzed by the experience of being a star in my school’s Drama Club that I went off and thought I would be an actor. I didn’t know of any other world. I certainly didn’t know about Dance. I do remember there was a flyer when I was about 8 or 9 years old that was sent around saying that in Danville, about ten miles away, there were Tap Dance classes available, but my parents were working in the fields, so the idea of someone driving me after school to take Tap Dance and coming back another 10 miles in the other direction was out of the question. They were tired when they got home, and so if you were going to do extra-curricular activities you were on your own. Sports, yes. There was a bus that would drop me at the end of a mile and a half dirt road that I had to walk in all sorts of weather to get home, but at least it would get me that close. Nobody was going to take me to Tap Dance classes. The first dance that I really saw was on television, that is, until I got to SUNY Binghamton and I saw the Graham Company and other things like that. I was hooked! Yeah, I was truly hooked!

AJH: Yes. Yes. What you’re saying resonates with me in ways I can’t even explain. I, too, was turned into a dancer here at Binghamton University.

BTJ: And they wanted us because they needed men, right?

AJH: Yes. Even today in most small towns all across the USA, guys do Ballet for free.

BTJ: Yes, it’s true, it’s true. It’s another type of male privilege. There was a certain kind of cockiness, no pun intended, that young dudes would find themselves taking on because they were in such demand. You also had to be a kind-of special person because the other guys were on your case about being queer, and of course some of us were queer, but the dance world was one place where we didn’t have to worry about it. Is that little studio, the dance studio in the Binghamton University Fine Arts Building down at the end of the hall on the first floor, still there?

AJH: Yes, in fact it now sports a plaque that reads, “The Percival Borde and Pearl Primus Dance Studio.” I think you must have studied with Percy Borde.

BTJ: Yes, I had Percival Borde for Afro and Afro-Caribbean, and Linda Grandy, a former member of the Doris Humphrey/Charles Weidman Company, for Modern and Ballet. Percival Borde had a lot of gifts, I mean, that’s where I first encountered Pearl Primus, and even Twyla Tharp, a young choreographer just getting her legs underneath her, had come on the invitation of Linda Grandy. Tywla was a crazy woman who had layers of clothes on that she would shed as she worked and got sweatier. She literally insulted people and some would leave in tears. She wasn’t suffering fools. If you couldn’t do the turn, you were out! I had a good education there, a good education.

AJH: What year did you start?

BTJ: I came there in September of 1970. That fall I left with Arnie Zane and went to Amsterdam for almost a year. After that I went to school in Brockport. At that time Brockport had Dick Bull working there—Improvisational Dance—and that’s where we met Lois Welk. She invited us to join the dance collective that they were forming out in the Bay area. We went out to California—my family also lived out there at that time—and then we all came back to a place that I knew, Binghamton. A film and art student named Phil Sykas knew about a space on Washington Street that had been the old Elks Club. It was skid row if you will, and of course we were able to get that place for a song. The roof was leaking, there was toxic dust all over the place, but we made use of its big spaces and as time went on we were able to upgrade. We moved to the old, derelict Abigail Whitney House on the North side of town. It was a YWCA at the time—kind of a rough neighborhood on the north side of Binghamton—and that’s where the Dance Asylum began its presenting series under the leadership and genius of Lois Welk with Arnie Zane supporting it. Arnie Zane and I started making our duets there in that space and those duets were our entrée into New York City.

AJH: So, you’re going to be performing here by way of Singapore. Have you been there before?

BTJ: This will be our second or third time. It’s a faraway place; very exotic. We did a USAID tour there in 1986 that went to Southeast Asia, including Singapore. We loved the food and we loved the mix of people.

AJH: That was going to be my next question. We played Singapore, too, for the Singapore Arts Festival back in 2002 and I came back just glowing about the food; rings of food vendors out on the periphery with interior tables. You just buy whatever you want and bring it to the center.

BTJ: Yeah. Street food.

AJH: Yes, street food in a very grand sense. Are there more stops other than Singapore?

BTJ: No. We did American Dance Festival this year, we did Spoleto, and we had some things to do in New York. We took seven weeks in our little house on a mesa in New Mexico. I went to Washington this week for a conference in planning an opera that I’m going to be directing in November with Opera Philadelphia, then we’re going out to Singapore and then we come back. Right after Binghamton I’m heading out to early workshops of a musical that is being mounted in Toronto, directed by Moisés Kaufman and written by Craig Lucas, that I’m choreographing. Finally, we will be back in New York for a Joyce season in the last week of October and the first week of November.

AJH: That’s so vigorous!

BTJ: Yes, and fortunately we have a wonderful associate, Janet Wong, who makes everything happen. She’s so organized, it’s scary. We have four different evenings now in repertory that we’re touring and there’s a newish piece called A Letter to My Nephew that was made for a French tour. We happened to be performing in Paris the night of the attack on the Bataclan Nightclub.

AJH: Oh my god.

BTJ: We were at our usual venue in Creteil, La Maison des Arts, and we did one wonderful evening. We got on the train; we heard that there were shootings in the center of the city. Little did we know the whole world had changed. And that piece, the second time it will be performed, will be in a version in Singapore called, A Letter to My Nephew, Singapore. You never know what confronts you, right? They keep asking me, Andy, the journalists of Singapore, ‘What’s the message of the piece?’ or ‘What inspires you?’ and I tell them this whole story: Initially it was inspired by James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, this essay in the New Yorker in 1964, which was explaining American racism to America in the form of a letter that he wrote to his young nephew about why his nephew’s father, James Baldwin’s brother, was so strict as a minister. My nephew, Lance, is a man who had quite a profligate life and was going to be a dancer, but instead he went off into drugs and into the sex industry. He and I have come back together as uncle and nephew, as men and as artists, trying to close the gap between us. I have the image of Lance, almost like a Frida Kahlo figure in his hospital bed, receiving postcards from the Eifel Tower, from the Concorde, places like that in France, so it was going to be a very tongue-in-cheek take on a travelogue. Of course we didn’t know what we were walking into; that this thing, which had some politics in it, suddenly was in the middle of a true conflagration of political intent, and that is going to inform the Singapore piece. Now, you should know that Singapore is protest averse; it’s a very conservative community.

AJH: Yes, it is.

BTJ: So they keep asking me, ‘Are you going to have politics in it?’ Well, I’ll have as much politics as the young, twenty-plus dancers we’ve been assigned, will. The work has as much Ferguson and Trayvon Martin as it does trans-gender rights, LGBT, ISIS; it’s like the CNN news cycle goes through my head; I see the image of my nephew floating in his bed. That is the piece that we are retrofitting and taking to Singapore.

AJH: I love it! So, how about the Binghamton program? I understand that there will be live music. Will you bring your own musicians?

BTJ: No. In Play and Play we usually use area musicians and in this particular repertoire it lends itself to Schubert’s Death and the Maiden, which any halfway decent quartet probably has within its reach, and of course the old warhorse, Mendelssohn’s Octet in E-Flat Major. The Schubert is to a piece called, Story, and the next piece is D-Man in the Waters.

AJH: Yeah, D-Man in the Waters is definitely on the bill; the other two I’m looking at here in this printout say Spent Days Out Yonder and Continuous Replay.

BTJ: Oh, I see. One is a restaging of an Arnie Zane work, but of course now Arnie would barely recognize it, and the other one is a work of mine that is about ten minutes long. Continuous Replay will be to Jerome Begin’s score. He’s a really wild, experimental composer, someone doing mix-ups and mash-ups of kind-of John Cage-ian devices with Beethoven. It will be an octet configuration, the same Octet that would play D-Man in the Waters. Spent Days out Yonder is a Mozart Andante, a quartet, that I’m sure would be the same players from the octet. I remember Binghamton had a constellation of rather high level musicians. Is the symphony still in play?

AJH: Yes, very much so. The Binghamton Philharmonic remains prominent and performs frequently.

BTJ: Wonderful. I’m sure the music will be first rate.

AJH: I’m sure it will. So, when you perform with live musicians, where do you put them on stage?

BTJ: We usually have them in the pit raised so that their heads can peek above the edge to see the stage for certain cuing.

AJH: So, Bill T. Jones, you’ve shared choreographic insights, formative experiences, your voice as a social activist and so much more. I wonder, if you were to direct me, what should I ask you? What have I missed?

BTJ: Well, you certainly have an on-the-ground familiarity with the terrain that leads one from Binghamton out into the world. I don’t need to say this to a Binghamton audience, I mean, they’re sophisticated, but as it was in the beginning and as it is now, one of the most important things I could ask an audience is to watch themselves watching as they look at the work; the choices that are made, who dances with whom, and how, and to think about time in all its manifestations. When you see Continuous Replay, you’ll see the spirit of Arnie Zane on that stage. The slicing hands were a reflection of the work that he did studying karate with Hidy Ochiai. Throughout the work you see our concerns with form and time. Continuous Replay was also equally informed by the cinema. We used to audit the coolest courses on campus at that time—the avant-garde analytical projector classes of Ken Jacobs and Larry Gottheim, where important filmmakers came because they had so much respect for Jacobs, Gottheim, and the serious discourse around that Cinema Department. What does it mean that we’re coming back to Binghamton? I just want you to know and Arnie and I thought of ourselves as artists first, and returning as artists, we show respect to Binghamton. What do I feel about Binghamton? Binghamton gave us space; physical space, but also space to be young and experimental. My hat is off to Binghamton.

Bill T. Jones’s returns to Binghamton University with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company on Wednesday, September 24th for a performance at the Anderson Center. Curtain time is 7:30pm. Tickets and more information available at andersoncenter.showare.com or by calling (607) 777-ARTS.

Andy Horowitz, of the internationally acclaimed dance troupe Galumpha, has performed his choreographic works at more than two thousand venues in thirty countries, including London’s Southbank Center, New York’s Lincoln Center, The Kennedy Center, The Seoul Arts Center, Berlin’s Akademie Der Künste, The Stadsschouwburg of Amsterdam, The Kravis Center, and countless others. He has been a featured performer on CBS’s Late Night with David Letterman, on the A&E Network, MTV, HBO, Canada’s Musique Plus, Germany’s ARTE Network, The BBC and Madrid’s Telecinco. Andy holds a BA in Theatre from Binghamton University and an MBA from Syracuse University. He lectures on entrepreneurship and offers choreographic workshops at schools and conservatories throughout the world. Andy is an artist-in-residence of Binghamton University’s department of Theatre, and lives in Binghamton, NY with his wife, Carol, and their two children, Talia and Elias.