CHOREOGRAPHER Bill T. Jones has worn the label "black, homosexual and HIV positive" so long he's given up resenting it. Forsaking the holy anger of his 1990 landmark, "Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land," and the exploration of life-threatening illness in the 1994 "Still/Here," the choreographer -- now 45 years old -- has turned away from overtly political and sexual message-making to pure movement.
And the movement is frenetic. Jones and his dance company are in a fever of performance, touring Paris; Rio de Janeiro; Ljubljana, Slovenia, and, closer to home, Boston; Austin, Texas; Seattle and Iowa City. On April 13, he performs with the soprano Dawn Upshaw at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley, Calif., and on April 25 with Upshaw at Carnegie Hall in New York. "Green and Blue" -- a new work set to Mozart for the Lyon Opera Ballet, where Jones is resident choreographer -- tours the U.S. this fall.
The 10th of 12 children, son of a contractor for migrant farm laborers, Jones was born in Florida, raised in upstate New York and got his first taste of dancing when he and his brothers and sisters spontaneously performed at an amusement park. With his partner, Arnie Zane, a wiry Jewish dancer from the Bronx, the panther-like Jones formed one of the most erotically provocative troupes of the 1980s New York avant-garde.
Zane died of AIDS in 1988, but Jones has carried on the work. "Last Night on Earth," Jones' exultant 1995 autobiography, written in collaboration with journalist Peggy Gillespie, is an object lesson in survival, charged with the redemptive qualities of memory and candor.
"Green and Blue" is the latest work in a line of exploration designed to secure me more firmly in the dance world. After I had made so many works with themes that are philosophical and social and so on, I had to ask myself if my primary commitment was still to movement. The answer was yes -- so I've gone about finding different ways of dancing. One way is to explore the inner body, the skeleton.
A lot of the movement in "Green and Blue" is done with backs to the audience to have them concentrate on small variations in the spine, the hips and the legs -- all supported by a very simple musical figure that is slowly evolving.
Is this a shift from your earlier political or social commentary?
It's not quite as sexy to talk about. What was being said in those earlier works was as important as how it was being danced. Here, I'm trying to think about how it's danced first, trusting that the political, social, all those things are in our bodies literally, and in the eyes of the beholder.
I continue to try to cultivate a company as varied as I can with people of all different sizes and shapes and colors. I don't think so much about what gender two people are when they are dancing together. Sometimes it's shocking to other people. But for me, I've been living this most of my adult sexual life.
What other works are you performing lately?
We just did a European tour where one of the pieces, called "Ballad," was based on a Dylan Thomas poem. I was reading a good deal of Thomas' poetry, having been struck by a TV program on the bombing of London and hearing him read his "Refusal to Mourn the Death of a Child by Fire in London." That was an accessible one, there were others where I didn't know what the hell the poems were about. Some were quite opaque. What moved me was the melody of his voice and the rhythm in his words. And I said, "Ah, here is a reason to dance."
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What is "Green and Blue" about?