Michigan Avenue - Niche Media - Michigan Avenue magazine is a luxury lifestyle magazine centered around Chicago’s finest people, events, fashion, health & beauty, fine dining & more!
Issue link: http://digital.greengale.com/i/175878
HOTTEST TICKET Read to Me, Speak to Me CHOREOGRAPHER BILL T. JONES BRINGS HIS VOICE TO A NEW DANCE WITH WORDS. E xperimentalist, formalist, populist, provocateur—dancer/choreographer Bill T. Jones has inhabited a variety of creative identities in his career. And at 61, he could well rest on his laurels, including Tony Awards for Fela! and Spring Awakening, a MacArthur Award, and a Kennedy Center Honor. But his roster of works keeps growing. Story/Time, which makes its Chicago debut this month when the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company appears at the Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago, takes its cue from the days before the avant-garde was fully commodified, when contemporary dance remained far from mainstream. 72 BY THOMAS CONNORS Looking back at his early years in the New York of the late '70s, Jones says, "Dance then was this huge, exciting new planet that we had discovered, and if you had enough chutzpah, you could go anywhere on that planet." He and his late partner, Arnie Zane, reveled in the spirit of openness that pervaded the downtown scene, and the willingness among artists to blur disciplines and mix media in an effort to make work utterly their own. "We were great fans of independent film as Jonas Mekas described it, a cinema of light and shade that was suspicious of narrative and continued on page 74 PHOTOGRAPHY BY GENE PITTMAN/COURTESY OF WALKER ART CENTER Choreographer Bill T. Jones sits at a table and recites stories while dancers perform behind him in Story/Time. MICHIGANAVEMAG.COM 072-074_MA_SC_HT_October13.indd 72 9/17/13 12:47 PM