Acclaimed out choreographer and dancer Bill T. Jones takes fans on a journey through one of his pivotal works, and the performers and times that inspired it, with his new book, “Story/Time: The Life of an Idea.” Part-autobiography, part-career reassessment, the book delves into details about Jones’ view on the artist/audience interaction and the ideas of indeterminacy, a concept created and championed by writer, composer and artist John Cage.
Jones himself continues to be a driving force in the world of choreography, having co-founded the legendary Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company with then-life-partner Zane.
The company, which joined up with Dance Theater Workshop to become New York Live Arts in 2011, is acclaimed for its performances all over the world. Jones has also made his mark on Broadway, having written and choreographed the hit musical “Fela!” which eared him a Tony and a Drama Desk Award for best choreography.
In “Story/Time,” Jones describes the genesis of the recent dance work of the same name produced by his company, and inspired by the modernist composer Cage. The book, like the performance, features a series of minute-long stories about Jones’ childhood as part of a Southern family that migrated to upstate New York, his struggles to find a place for himself in a white-dominated dance world and about his encounters with artists and musicians. One of those artists, Cage, intrigued him with an idea of avant-garde modernism and disregard for audience response that became known as indeterminacy.
Jones described his experience of seeing Cage’s work for the first time in 1972, when he was a student at SUNY Binghamton, as bewildering and boring, but it stayed with him long after.
“It was a comfort and a provocation, and he remains that,” he said of Cage. “It’s become an even-stronger idea as time has gone on. Do I like everything that he came up with? I’m not that type of audience member. I don’t immediately decide that I like something. [I ask] was it interesting? Was it something that I can use? Because I’m very interested in art making an impact in the world of ideas. So John Cage to me will always remain a banquet of ideas. My own personal tastes, what I listen to for pleasure; I wake up listening to Luther Vandross. Today I was listening to Gillian Welch. That’s all music for my pleasure. When I go looking for discourse and meaning, I find the music and works of John Cage essential.”
Bewildering and boring usually aren’t two emotional states that go together, but even Jones himself described this book and the works it is based upon as “conflicted.” He noted the feelings of anger that came from the growing realization that he has never had an intellectual home.
“It’s very much something I’ve been dealing with,” Jones said. “Persons like myself who are involved in the world of ideas might be inclined to feel that way when they realize that ideas are in some ways like a mirage. You are on your own here. You have to figure it out and make up things as you go. I think what you have in front of you are the choices made by the speaker. They are indeterminant. John Cage felt that indeterminacy was a tool, a way to get to an end.”
The one-minute stories Jones wrote for the performances of “Story/Time” are included in the book, transcribed down to the second at which each word in the story is spoken when performed. The stories are also numbered in the order they are written, which is not the order in which they are performed.
We wondered if stories, presented in such detail and removed from the context of a live performance, were supposed to allow the audience to focus more on them.
That may or may not have been the idea, Jones said.
“It’s another experience,” he added. “It provides another avenue of looking at something, which is what I mean by the discourse. Turn it around and look at it that way. The idea has no destination. It’s something for people to wrap their minds around. What’s the message? Where are you going? What does it mean?”
Eager to keep the liberal-arts beach ball of thought in the air, we asked if we could take the stories out of the show’s order and rearrange them chronologically.
“It would certainly change something about the experience,” Jones said. “I don’t know if it would make it better or worse. I ordered them because, myself, I wanted to be aware of how they grew. Indeterminacy tells us there are many ways they can be ordered. I know for a fact that John Cage has a novel of indeterminant stories. He has various systems of stories that he has cut up. They can be read with other organizing principles. Some could be read in a chronological order. I think that is what is so much fun about it. Right now, in the performances we are doing as a company in New York City, I have been doing three or four new versions of ‘Story/Time.’ One of them is the classic one. The other is called ‘History,’ where I have gone through all my stories looking for those that talk about the early days of Arnie [Zane] and my working together.”
With so many acclaimed performance pieces to his credits, we asked Jones if he plans to detail any of his other shows in print like he has with “Story/Time.” He said this book isn’t so much a retrospective as it is the exploration of another artist’s concept and what Jones did with it.
“I wanted to talk about how one idea that a person might have can stay with someone their whole life and evolve,” he said. “None has been more durable than the idea that John Cage had about chance and indeterminacy. It’s been there for many, many years in my life. I don’t have other ideas like that. I’m constantly going back and cannibalizing, taking ideas and context out of there. There are some works that I fantasize about going back to because of their ideas. Would I remake them or try to take another swipe at them? There’s a series of dances that I made in the early 2000s and I feel the musical scores are so rich that I could revisit those pieces, just to see if I could go deeper into it. Indeterminacy and ‘Story/Time’ are someone else’s idea that seemed to be infinitely flexible. Therefore, it resulted in this series of lectures and this book.”
“Story/Time: The Life of an Idea” is available in stores now. Bill T. Jones will be participating in a live Q&A with Tamala Edwards of 6ABC Action News 7:30 p.m. Oct. 16 at Central Library, 1901 Vine St. For more information, call 215-567-4341 or visit www.billtjones.org.