Bill T Jones

Just finished reading Bill T Jones' autobiography Last Night On Earth. Named after one of his solo dances, the book is a collage of writing styles. Bill narrates his personal history like a storyteller, describes his artworks like a cataloger and contemplates issues of sexuality, race and performance like a poet.

I found the summaries of his finished works dryly factual, assumedly bland in contrast to the experience of seeing the work itself. These sections lack the artistic descriptions that his stories and pensive moments boast. Not to say that it's easy to write short summaries of physical performances that one invests so much into, physically and emotionally. It just gives me a "you just should have been there" feeling.

As a writer and an artist Bill strikingly places beauty and brutality side by side. Perhaps his life experiences dictate that. Many of his intensely personal passages have to do with bittersweet sexual experiences. He tells of the close ties between his sexual and artistic identities, narrating the strains and joys of dancing with and choreographing for men he had sexual relationships with. Most defining was his relationship with Arnie Zane, a man who he began his dance career with and who died of AIDS after several years performing with Bill as a duo dance company.

I've seen the "making of" films for two of Bill's works, Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land and Still/Here, as well as clips of those performances, so I had Bill's warm, musical way of talking in my head before I began reading his autobiography. The memory of his charismatic filmed presence was reassuring in reading some of the more difficult passages.

Bill T Jones and Arnie Zane in 1982

What follows is an interesting philosophical moment, one in many examples of Bill's inviting imagery.

"A performer secretly believes that there is nothing worth doing other than performing. The entire day of the performance is nothing more than preparation for that one, two, two-and-one-half hours standing in a glorious arena, a circle of transformation, a ridiculous one-ring circus, a black void with artificial sunrises, sunsets, tiny vortices of light, screaming shafts of illumination striking the performer from this side, that side. A world wherein he's completely exposed, relying on minute tricks to hide imperfections and mistakes. The performer who takes the stage must believe that he is fascinating, that he or she deserves to be the locus of several hundred or thousand points of attention. The job of the performer is to pull that instant community of individuals full of distraction, expectation, and hope into a timeless dimensionless now. At best he or she is a conduit, a vessel through which numerous substances are channelled. Sometimes choking, sometimes abrasive or acidic, gouging. Sometimes sweet, surprising. And sometimes, nothing."

Bill T Jones' website is http://www.billtjones.org.