Working in collaboration is one of the ways Farhadian transcends the solo nature of performance. In her duets, she is both composing and improvising on the fly. There’s a shared musical space. Farhadian, formerly a classical musician, and Santomieri, formerly a rock musician, work with both structured and free improvisations. With eXcavations, double bassist Klaus Kürvers and violinist Thea Farhadian integrate raw string sounds with a rusty character. The result sounds both old and new. A poetic archiving, in a way.
Thea Farhadian and Dean Santomieri.
Photo by Viola Wu
Farhadian’s music path has not come without obstacles. The hardest time in her personal history came when she was in a relationship with a female partner from another country. Most of her family did not accept Thea’s partner. Her father, ill with cancer at the time, was the most kind and accepting, and that meant a lot to Thea. Much later on, her mother came to respect Thea’s life choices. “In the end, I think having experienced being an outsider makes me much more empathetic to people regardless of their backgrounds or experiences,” she said.
First and foremost, Thea Farhadian is an artist. She’s paid the price and “wants to be seen for who I am and for my work to be heard and appreciated for what it is without my sexuality contextualizing it. That said, I do like the term queer as it is a word chosen by a younger generation and it takes what was originally a negative term and transforms it.”
Her advice to young queer artists and musicians: “Don’t give up!”
“I do like the term queer as it is a word chosen by a younger generation and it takes what was originally a negative term and transforms it.”
Her advice to young queer artists and musicians: “Don’t give up!”
Thea Farhadian
Bill T. Jones: Choreographer on the Cultural Forefront
Two-Time Tony Award-Winning Choreographer
MacArthur “Genius”
National Medal of Arts Winner
Bill T. Jones, two-time Tony Award-winning choreographer, MacArthur “Genius,” National Medal of Arts and Doris Duke Artist Award-winner, crosses barriers to create works that tackle the BIG subjects: love, loneliness, identity, marginalization, loss of control, meaning, illness, death, and spiritual triumph. Jones is fearless while being afraid. “I think it takes courage to be alive as a sensitive person, particularly in mid-life if you’ve been a performer as I have where your body is your stock and trade, your calling card and then your body is changing “It’s a crap shoot. It’s a beautiful crap shoot. But, it’s a crap shoot,” he said.
Bill T. Jones and Bjorn Amelan, together since first meeting in Paris, Feb. 16, 1992 Partners and arts collaborators Bjorn Amelan is a set designer for NY LiveArts Elisa Rolle, LiveJournal
Jones was not always a dancer. He began life in 1952 in Bunnell, Florida, the tenth of twelve children born to migrant potato pickers who moved permanently to upstate New York, where Bill spent the bulk of his childhood. A theater major on an athletic scholarship to State University of New York in Binghamton, he found his calling when he wandered into an African dance class. The smell of sweat and dynamic pounding on the floor captivated him. Soon, he was eschewing track practice to take dance classes. There he met Arnie Zane, a Jewish-Italian white gay man, a SUNY graduate returning to study photography, who ventured into dance classes with Bill. That began a seventeen-year life and avant-garde modern dance partnership that ended with Zane’s death at age thirty-nine as a result of AIDS.
The boundary-crossing work begun with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company continues to this day with Jones’ world premiere, Analogy/Dora: Tramontane. For this work, Jones drew upon ten years of interviewing Holocaust survivor Dora Amelan, the mother of his husband and life partner of twenty-four years, Bjorn Amelan, a Jewish French-Israeli sculptor and set designer. The new work depicts one refugee’s journey in the midst of crisis. “Dora Amelan is a family member whom I love, not a newspaper article “Her experience opened history to me in a way the media cannot,” Jones explained. That experience opens audiences and dance companies alike to the theme of Holocaust, not as an historical footnote, but as a very real and ongoing human crisis.
Still/Here remains one of the most controversial dance works created by Jones. He used his own experience of living with HIV since his diagnosis in 1986, and gathered non-dancers from around the country, working with them to express their feelings about living with life-threatening illness. He used that material—actual non-dancers and their stories—to meld with his dance company to create a dramatic paean to life. Still represented the quiet moment in response to diagnosis, and Here represented the dramatic sense of being present in the moment that often comes with the urgency of being told one has a life-threatening illness. Jones courageously told the untold stories of the many nameless life-threateningly ill around the country in a way that connected audiences to their own mortality, and stirred such controversy that one New York critic panned the work without even seeing it. It led to deeper questions: “What is the meaning of life? What brings meaning to your life? What do you love? Now, go do that.”
Some of Jones’ most emblematic works have occurred off Broadway. When Arnie Zane died, Jones danced Absence (1989), one of the most exquisite expressions of love and loss ever to grace the stage. Aged thirty-seven, he danced a duet with his now invisible partner, expressing in movement the inexpressible. “It was a gift actually. Absence connected me to the big spiritual existential questions about the nature of death, about love,” Jones said.
However, the Broadway stage is where Bill T. Jones has garnered his widest audience. In 2007, he won the Tony Award for Best Choreography for the musical Spring Awakening, the story of a nineteenth-century German schoolgirl coming of age and the collective rebellion of German teens in an era of repression and structure. In The Bitch of Living number shown at the 2007 Tony Awards, worldwide television audiences got to see the genius of Jones. He took schoolboy adolescents in laced up boots and uniforms and created a dance where they stomp and yell and break out of the strictures of their constrained upbringing. How did Jones relate to a culture so different from his own? “I didn’t have to go back to the nineteenth century. Right, I’m a stomper, if that’s what you mean…I think the Coming of Age story is told again and again in popular media “I did it with gestures and they turned out to be pretty universal, actually.”
Bjorn Amelan and Bill T. Jones, Aberdeen Restaurant, White Plains, NY.
Photo by Chester Higgins Jr., NY Times
In 2010, American audiences saw and could begin to understand the experiences of African musicians and activists by looking at the world through Fela Kuti’s eyes. Jones again succeeded in transporting mostly white middle class American audiences to conservative, corrupt Nigeria to meet Fela!, the Afrobeat musician and activist who was jailed nearly 200 times in his young life and had nearly every bone in his body broken by a repressive military regime. The thunder and pulse of Jones’ second Tony Award-winning musical pushed audiences to stand up in the middle of the production and move their hips to Fela’s “The Clock,” adapted from Fela Kuti’s stage performances. “There is a