Exposing his own vulnerability is what endears Bill T. Jones to his young dancers, fellow choreographers, and wide audiences. Jones is seizing new opportunities to disseminate the language of the body even as his body ages, even as he is surrounded by the speedy, lithe, flexible pantheon of young dancers in his company. In 2011, Jones took on the great challenge of merging a dance company, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, and a dance movement incubator space, the Dance Theater Workshop of New York, to create an entirely new body arts organization, the New York Live Arts nonprofit, set in the heart of Chelsea. The unprecedented collaboration that created NY Live Arts, a service organization, has an Artistic Director who is a working choreographer with a resident company. Is Jones afraid of the responsibility as Cofounder and Artistic Director, of filling the 20,000-square foot home that houses a 184-seat theater and two 1,200-square foot studio spaces? You bet he is, but that has never stopped him from proceeding to create a place where “thinking and movement meet the future.”
Bill T. Jones receives the 2013 National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama.
Photo by Pete Souza
Determined to expose a broader range of audiences, particularly people of color, Jones has always been a “Black male in the white avant-garde his whole career. Don’t get me wrong: I run a theater. How do we keep all the critics of the NY Times and middle class audiences happy and, at the same time, get people in there who want to bop along to Hamilton?…People who look very different than what we’re up against in the downtown New York City art world “This country is so craven and profit-driven that when true art does not have a market value, people shun it. Every one of us whom I call cultural workers—how do we get the attention of an ever more attention-deficit population? I hope audiences will come closer to their own processes and realize they’re collaborators in all cultural events, particularly in the theater. They are expected to be alive and very much aware of the myriad of things occurring on stage and the myriad of things occurring inside of themselves.”
How does he work with NY Live Arts set designer and husband, Bjorn Amelan, and then go back home to Valley Cottage without feeling compressed? “Arnie Zane and I built the dance company and he and I were companions for seventeen years until he died. I’ve never done it any other way. I can’t even imagine a relationship where you go home and where you talk about your work that day at the stock market and I talk about my work that day at the studio “I don’t think that the separation between life and art exists in that way.”
Analogy/ Dora: Tramontane is Jones’ latest work and is part of a trilogy. Part II, Analogy/Lance: Pretty aka The Escape Artist and Part III, Analogy/ Ambrose: The Emigrant will be performed in 2016 and 2017. The third work uses the German novel, The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald, as its point of departure. Jones will continue to perform Story/Time, inspired by John Cage’s 1959 Indeterminacy, a compendium of 180 one-minute everyday Bill T. Jones stories, seventy of which are recited on stage with young dancers swirling all around him.
The best advice that guides him today came early on from his mother, who had seen “a vale of sorrows” and said to him, “Life ain’t nothin’ child than putting one foot in front of another.” Bill T. Jones has done just that and more in his creative life.
“This country is so craven and profit-driven that when true art does not have a market value, people shun it. Every one of us whom I call cultural workers—how do we get the attention of an ever more attention-deficit population? “
Bill T. Jones
Tony Kushner: An Angel in America
Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-Winning Playwright
Emmy Award-Winning Screenwriter
Trudging across the marshy fields of Lake Charles, Louisiana, the slight adolescent was carrying a heavy wooden case that housed his cello. He slipped in the mud and his case broke open, sending the bridge, finger board and peg box flying. When he got to his father’s university office and told him the story, his father said, “You don’t really like this and I don’t think you should play anymore. I don’t want you to be part of the orchestra.” His father had taken over the Governor’s Program for Gifted Children as orchestra conductor for his very sick mother. Tony reacted, “Good. I don’t want to be in your orchestra. You’re mean.”
Tony Kushner and his father had a strained relationship when he was growing up. Tony believes his father realized he was gay as early as age two or three and he didn’t like it—he didn’t like Tony being called a sissy and didn’t like Tony’s lack of athletic ability and interest in sports. Tony was not alone in not fitting into the family dream. His older sister was born deaf in a family of professional musicians. William Kushner was a conductor and clarinetist, and Sylvia Kushner was an accomplished bassoonist. When Leslie Kushner was small, 1950s doctors blamed Tony’s mother’s professional gigs away from home for Leslie’s “psychosomatic deafness.” Doctors and psychologists insisted that mothers should not work and should stay at home. In denial, Tony’s parents did not fit Leslie with hearing aids until she was four.
So, when Tony finally came out in his early twenties, it was his brilliant painter sister whom he first told. Both she and he shared outsider status in the family. Tony’s younger brother, Eric, is a principal hornist for the Vienna Philharmonic, so carried on the family’s musical tradition.
Tony Kushner’s mother and his father were working musicians. Born in Manhattan, New York City, they harbored concerns that their professional musician status and travel schedule would be too financially and emotionally costly to raise a family. Shortly after Tony’s birth, they returned to Lake Charles, Louisiana, at the urging of Tony’s grandfather, owner of a lumber business. They soon found their way back to professional musicianship and gave Tony Kushner a blueprint for living as a working artist.
William Kushner’s two great loves were music and literature. He could quote Keats and Shakespeare by heart. So, Tony grew up hearing the words of the great literary giants in his own home.
Tony Kushner always wanted to be a working artist, though he never imagined his second play, Angels in America, would catapult him to fame and fortune. In the two-part play, Angels in America: Millennium Approaches and Angels in America: Perestroika, Kushner broke both the rules of play-making, staging a seven-hour epic over the course of two days, and the silence surrounding the AIDS epidemic in America. “In a sense, until Hamilton came along, nothing else since Angels has had that kind of impact. So most of what has happened to me as a professional writer is in one way or another traceable to Angels in America. The sweep of it would make a claim on the importance of gay people in American life. It presented the idea that what was happening in the lives of gay men and lesbians was a worthy subject for a really sprawling momentous play not only for the LGBTQ, but the American, community at large,” Kushner said.
When Angels opened, it was a huge sensation in 1990, but Tony’s mother never fully realized Kushner’s success. She died at age sixty-seven of breast cancer in that same year. Tony was just thirty-four.
Tony Kushner’s father was one of the first to read a draft of Angels in America. He called Tony and said, “I will tell you that I find some of this ugly in terms of the subject matter. I have a great deal of difficulty with it, but as writing, it’s very beautiful and I think it’s going to be a very big deal.” Oskar Eustis at the Eureka Theater in San Francisco suggested the standard 2.5 hours as a guideline for the play’s length. Eustis, now Artistic Director of the Public Theater of New York City and creative collaborator on the musical Hamilton, trusted Kushner’s instincts, however.
Those instincts proved prescient. For the play, Tony Kushner won an unprecedented 1993 Tony Award and Pulitzer