Thinking of Bill T. Jones
An Interview from 1997
James Joyce once spoke of art as being an affirmation of life. Do you think that that is true of art in general and of dance in particular?
Bill T. Jones:
Oh yes – I really think that dance is the greatest expression of the human spirit. I know that sounds very easy to say. I just the other day spoke to an art colony in Maine, a very prestigious one, very competitive and they say: art college for advanced artists. They are very young but they are very good, very strong. They are not at all sentimental about what art may be or is. I found myself there trying to convince them to be more passionate, to talk, to sing, you know, because I found that a lot of the art, a lot of it started in this city, a lot of ways of looking at art in the twentieth century had to do with concept, the idea and a lot of my work is having to do with the heart.
Why do we dance? You know. People think everyone can dance. We go to a disco. We dance to seduce, right? But then I would like to have a dance that was like the dance in a culture which makes the rain, a dance that makes babies come, you know? Of course, I’m not that but how do I get that sense of communal, maybe even a tribal, feeling in each work and that’s what I truly believe in and that’s the thing which has helped me recover from the great sadness of losing Arnie Zane, dancing. So, it is an affirmation, for me.
Robert Rauschenberg once said that his art was about getting people to look somewhere else. Would you say that this is true of your work?
Bill T. Jones:
Well you know I’m frustrated right now with dance because I would love it to be as free as walking into a gallery and seeing an installation. I can look if I want to. I can walk around it. I can leave. I can come back. But theatre is not that way. You pay your money. The door is open. You sit down. The curtain comes up. You have to watch. Either you like it or you don’t. The curtain goes down and you go home. Yet I am constantly looking for how do we make it a contemplative experience, period, without being so stylized and slow or how does it stay rich and visceral but yet it's like a bit of a contemplative experience. A piece like Ursonnate, maybe. Bluephrase, yes. A piece like Some songs is designed for my dancers to give to you from their hearts, from their bodies. It’s designed for you to enjoy the dancing but some of the pieces are really designed for you to look at them as you would at a painting or listen to music. I do want you to look at a stage full of people mind you. Don’t assume they are anything. They are people, dancing. They are not machines, they are not ideas, they are not musical notes. They are people, dancing, because I think people are sublime, you know, spiritual things.
Ushio Amagatsu described the essence of dance as being a question of tension and relaxation. How would you describe it?
Bill T. Jones:
The essence of life is. Sex is. Growing old, being born is. I’m forty-five now. When my body is at rest it doesn’t want to move. I have to go from being at rest to make it move. And it resists me every inch of the way and this seems to be what I'm learning about life, I mean when I meet people. How do I share the view of what I feel. There is a tension in my ego and your perception of it and how do I make us one? And it’s very true in dance also. Duets are very attractive to make but I don’t want to make duets about conflict all the time. I like very much the poster of the festival but I wonder if people always think that dance is...This is a mating ritual, right? I’m not interested...I don’t want to do that. I think that people think that this is what dance is about: fucking – the world thinks that that is what we are about: fucking, and I think there is another metaphor there too – about opposites and all, but I’m trying to understand too how to talk about other things that we do that involve this tension. You know what I mean? A lot of people feel that dance is very narcissistic, about sex, always. Basically, that’s what they think it’s about and there is nothing wrong with sex, it is a great driving engine but, somehow, it’s harder for us to rise above it, to move away from it.
Ted Hughes talks about Shakespeare’s works as being akin to mathematical calculus in their construction. Do you have any principles or methods in constructing or structuring a work?
Bill T. Jones:
Principles? Well I’m very improvisational in my thinking. I work from moment to moment. I’m very interested in asymmetry. I have a distrust of symmetry. Maybe because I tend to be a very symmetrical person. So, I’m constantly thinking about the potential of throwing things off balance.
In the work for José you will watch sometimes how he will repeat a movement several times but every time he repeats it, it is somehow slightly different. A lot of the improvisation is made in my body and I never do anything exactly the same and that’s why on trying to learn improvisation as it was. So that’s the principle of living in the moment, realising it. Who was it who said you can never step in the same river twice? How to give the impression that what you are seeing is being made for the first time. That is a guiding principle. They say that art should always surprise you. I don’t know if I always succeed but I’m trying to understand: what is the nature of surprise? I don’t know you. How do I know it is going to surprise you? So maybe that’s a principle also. I torture my dancers all the time when we do a simple movement. I always say: that was good but it was too easy. Now let’s make it more difficult and they think that’s perverse but me I think it’s a way of pushing, of looking for new solutions.
What qualities does an idea have to have to make a good show?
Bill T. Jones:
I think it’s got to have a certain clarity. I think it has to have a certain aspect that is never resolved. It’s a very twentieth century way of looking at things, I know.
I learned a lot from working with Mozart’s music for the Lyon Opera Ballet. Mozart always resolved. Here (in the twentieth century) we distrust resolution and I think that I’m a very twentieth century person but I’m at war with that because I need in my life now resolution. I need to find something to really believe in and to trust but it shows. I see it in my sequences. Things always sort of fall apart or are left unanswered. To a twentieth century person this is true.
I worked with Trisha Brown and the way she would build in one movement after another, very slowly, until she got this thing, that’s her great genius. My genius and I think I’m good, is in the moment of dancing. I’m a repository (of what twentieth century modern dance has been dealing with) of a lot of that because of what I have studied and my position. I started dancing in the early seventies. I studied contact improvisation. I studied Cunningham, Grant, Ballum, Humphrey, Wideman technique and lots and lots of improvisation. I can do those things. They are part of me. So, when I dance to Mozart or when I dance to Stravinsky I’m having a dialogue with them, a very rich dialogue. Rather than throw it away I frame it, I stop it and then I have to go inside of it and analyse it to teach it. José....his body is very different from mine. Therefore, he is adding another layer of interpretation to something. I think it’s a very valid and rich experiment because that’s where my greatest gift is, in the moment and in this body.
I was born in 1952. Brown vs. Welfare education was 1954/55. The march on Washington was in '64. Stonewall, the gay liberation was in 1969. Merce Cunningham became the Senior at a time when I was just beginning to study what dance was. Merce was already establishment. Judson Church. All of those experimental art forms. My generation came directly after that. So, all of that is dumped into us and we lived in a little crucible that was an art ghetto. So, we were constantly creating ourselves, recreating ourselves. I think that a lot of that is in my muscles, a lot of struggle in the last thirty, forty years are literally in my muscles and you see it when I dance to Mozart, you see it when I dance to Beethoven and I think that that’s something that I am proud of. But...I don’t want to throw it to the eternal spaces anymore. I want to capture it so I can share it with somebody else knowing that they’re going to make it different.
Do you think that the key to good choreography is knowing when to leave the individual dancer space to develop and knowing instinctively when to be supportive?
Bill T. Jones:
You’d be a very good director. That’s exactly the truth. I think that people, like children, need boundaries and they also need a challenge that says to them: I dare you to jump over this boundary. And when they try you say: No, I don’t believe you. No, try it again. That is what a good director is. I think a person who sets up boundaries and also a place where people feel safe. Feel safe to test those boundaries.
What do you expect and demand of your dancers?
Bill T. Jones:
I expect that they are compelling human beings. Make me interested in you, in your questions. Then technically. Can they cut the demands of the choreography? And, are they a bit crazy? In other words, do they want something badly. The way José would act that material was exactly what I was looking for. I could see him every day grabbing it, taking it ’til it was his. He is a stage animal. The meaning of his life is apparent when he is on stage. I’d like every dancer in my company to have that. Not everybody has it. No. Some people are much cooler than others. Some people are bad. They want to be loved but they have nothing to love.
What would you say is of greatest importance for a young dancer to do and to learn?
Bill T. Jones:
They have to learn at once how to free themselves and to control themselves. Do you exercise every day on some level? Even if you’re not doing it for a choreographer are you doing it for yourself? Do you take what you do seriously? No, I think dancers are very self-effacing people. They often have a real bad self-image. Therefore, they tend to be bitchy. They tend to think badly of themselves and what they do they degrade it. I don’t want them around me. You know in Karate when you walk in to the Gosho. You say: “Good morning Sensei”. Even when there is no teacher around. I was told that’s not about the teacher, that’s about the practice. They hold the practice in such high esteem that they honour it in the acceptable space. We don’t do formal things like that but I don’t accept any disrespect to the work. You can critique the work. You can say it’s bad or good but you must respect it.