Guild Hall proudly presents the Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane Company, one of the most influential and innovative dance companies of our time. Founded in 1982 by the legendary duo Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, the company has consistently redefined the boundaries of contemporary dance, blending movement with narrative, visual art, and spoken word.
For this special performance, the company presents Story/Time, a mesmerizing work inspired by legendary artist and composer John Cage’s Indeterminacy—a performance of one-minute stories interrupted by a chance musical score. In Story/Time, Jones creates a collage of dance, music, and his own short stories, arranged anew for each performance through chance procedure. The result is a dynamic fusion of movement and meaning, where audiences are invited to find their own connections in a sweep of randomized, disparate elements—much like a busy streetscape or a crowded room.
Jones’ short stories, drawn from his own life and generations of family narratives, layer traditional storytelling against avant-garde composition, questioning the tension between high and low art. The piece also marks the first collaboration between the Company and composer, musician, and intermedia artist Ted Coffey, Ph.D., whose acoustic and electronic score incorporates chance procedure and interactive technologies.
Join us for an evening of innovative movement, layered storytelling, and artistic experimentation as Bill T. Jones and his company continue their groundbreaking legacy.
The performance environment is shaped by long-time Company collaborators Robert Wierzel (lighting design), Bjorn Amelan (décor), and Liz Prince (costume design).
Story/Time had its world premiere in January 2012 at Peak Performances @ Montclair State University (NJ). Co-commissioned by Peak Performances @ Montclair State and the Walker Art Center, the work was developed in residence at Arizona State University Gammage Auditorium, Bard College, Montclair State University’s Alexander Kasser Theater, the University of Virginia, and the Walker Art Center.
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BILL T. JONES/ARNIE ZANE COMPANY
The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company was born in 1982 out of an 11-year collaboration between Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane (1948–1988). During this time, they redefined the duet form and foreshadowed issues of identity, form and social commentary that would change the face of American dance. The Company has performed worldwide in over 200 cities in 40 countries on every major continent and is recognized as one of the most innovative and powerful forces in the dance-theater world.
The repertory of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company is widely varied in its subject matter, visual imagery and stylistic approach to movement, voice and stagecraft and includes musically-driven works as well as works using a variety of texts. The Company has been acknowledged for its intensely collaborative method of creation that has included artists as diverse as Keith Haring, Cassandra Wilson, The Orion String Quartet, the Chamber Society of Lincoln Center, Fred Hersch, Jenny Holzer, Robert Longo, Julius Hemphill and Daniel Bernard Roumain, among others. The collaborations of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company with visual artists were the subject of ArtPerforms Life (1998), a groundbreaking exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN.
Some of its most celebrated creations are evening length works including Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land (1990, Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music);Still/Here (1994, Biennale de la Danse in Lyon, France); We Set Out Early… Visibility Was Poor(1996, Hancher Auditorium, Iowa City, IA); You Walk? (2000, European Capital of Culture 2000,Bolgna, Italy); Blind Date (2006, Peak Performances at Montclair State University);Chapel/Chapter (2006, Harlem Stage Gatehouse); and Fondly Do We Hope… Fervently Do We Pray(2009, Ravinia Festival, Highland Park, IL). The ongoing, site-specific, Another Evening was last performed in its seventh incarnation as Another Evening: Venice/Arsenale (2010, La Biennale di Venezia).
The Company has also produced two evenings centered on Bill T. Jones’s solo performance: The Breathing Show (1999, Hancher Auditorium, Iowa City, IA) and As I Was Saying… (2005, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN).
The Company has been featured in many publications and one of the most in-depth examinations of Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane’s collaborations can be found in Body Against Body: The Dance and Other Collaborations of Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane (1989 – Station Hill Press) edited by Elizabeth Zimmer.
The Company has received numerous awards, including New York Dance and Performance Awards (“Bessie”) for Chapel/Chapter at Harlem Stage (2006), The Table Project (2001), D-Man in the Waters (1989 and 2001), musical scoring and costume design for Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land (1990) and for the groundbreaking Joyce Theater season (1986). The Company was nominated for the 1999 Laurence Olivier Award for “Outstanding Achievement in Dance and Best New Dance Production” for We Set Out Early… Visibility was Poor.
The Company celebrated its landmark 20th anniversary at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with 37 guest artists including Susan Sarandon, Cassandra Wilson and Vernon Reid. The Phantom Project: The 20th Season presented a diverse repertoire of over 15 revivals and new works.
During the Company’s 25th anniversary season in 2007, Ravinia Festival in Highland Park, IL offered the Company its most significant commission to date: to create a work to honor the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth. The Company created three new productions in response:100 Migrations (2008), a site-specific community performance project; Serenade/The Proposition(2008), examining the nature of history; and Fondly Do We Hope… Fervently Do We Pray (2009), the making of which is the subject of a feature-length documentary by Kartemquin Films entitled A Good Man, broadcast on PBS American Masters in 2011.
The Company has distinguished itself through extensive community outreach and educational programs, including partnerships with Bard College, where company members teach an innovative curriculum rooted in the Company’s creative model and highly collaborative methods; and with Lincoln Center Institute, which uses Company works in its educator-training and in-school repertory programs. University and college dance programs throughout the U.S. work with the Company to reconstruct significant works for their students. The Company conducts intensive workshops for professional and pre-professional dancers and produces a broad range of discussion events at home and on the road, all born from the strong desire to “participate in the world of ideas.”
Sponsors
Performing Arts programming is supported in part by funding from Galia Meiri-Stawski and Axel Stawski, Henry and Peggy Schleiff, The Melville Straus Family Endowment, and Monica and Peter Tessler. Music Programming is supported in part by The Ellen and James S. Marcus Endowment for Musical Programming.
Additional support provided by Friends of the Theater: John and Joan D’Addario, Natascia Ayers and Jim Ciquera, Christine and Bill Campbell, Gabrielle and Gianpaolo de Felice, Lena Kaplan, Hilarie and Mitchell Morgan, Michèle and Steve Pesner, The Schaffner Family Foundation, Lisa Schultz and Ezriel Kornel, Jayne Baron Sherman and Deborah Zum, Stacey and Oliver Stanton, Leila Straus, Susi and Peter Wunsch, and Andrew Yuder and Kyle Glaeser.