Chamber Dance Company Archive: Bill T. Jones

American dancer, choreographer

"Living and dying is not the issue. The big issue is what you are going to do with the time while you are here."

                                       -Bill T. Jones

Born February 15, 1952.

Bill T. Jones is the recipient of the 2005 Wexner prize, the 2005 Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award for Lifetime Achievement, and a 2005 Harlem Renaissance Award. He received a 2007 Tony Award for his choreography for the Broadway Musical, Spring Awakening. In 1994 Mr. Jones received a MacAurther "genius" Award. He is also the recipient of numerous New York Dance and Performance "Bessie" Awards. Mr. Jones began his dance training at SUNY Binghamton. He choreographed and performed worldwide as a soloist and duet company with his late partner, Arnie Zane before forming the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company in 1982. Creating more than one hundred works for his own company, Mr. Jones has also choreographed for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Axis Dance Company, Boston Ballet, Lyon Opera Ballet, Berlin Opera Ballet, and Diversions Dance Company, among others. He has collaborated with legendary artists such as Toni Morrison, Max Roach, Jessye Norman, Vernon Reed, Keith Haring, Laurie Anderson and Jenny Holzer. Mr. Jones television credits include PBS's Great Performances series (Fever Swamp and Last Super at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land) and Alive from Off Center. Still/Here was co-directed for television by Bill T. Jones and Gretchen Bender. A PBS documentary of the making of Still/Here, by Bill Moyers and David Grubin, Bill T. Jones: Still/Here with Bill Moyers, premired in 1997. The 1999 Blackside documentary I'll Make me a World: A Century of African American Arts, profiled Jones's work. His 1989 D-Man in the Waters is featured in Free to Dance, a 2001 Emmy Award winning documentary that chronicles modern dance's African American Roots.

Watch Section 1 of Bill T. Jones' D-Man in the Water at the Media Arcade, in Vol. 49 of the Chamber Dance Company Archive (DVD UWDP 001 v.49).