It’s never been much fun writing about choreography by Bill T.
Jones. It was easier when he worked with Arnie Zane, co-founder
of the dance company they shared. Jones was tall, black, and
statuesque and Zane was short, white, and weasely. Neither
was a born dancer with a born dance body and the work they did
together was like a Hope and Crosby road movie: they made it up
as they went along—posturing, pontificating, parodying. It was
two guys who knew nothing about making dances making dances.
Zane was the better mover; quick, sly, a sort of dance-department
pickpocket, wedges and squiggles pinched from the
air. Jones was lumbering, lagging behind, his lumpy muscles
somehow in the way. The twosome was openly gay, and soon had
a following that was looking for an alternative dance by
alternative dancers. Their biggest hit together was called Secret
Pastures (1984), a Frankenstein story in which Jones was the fabricated man,
Zane the feisty scientist.
I remember Pastures as zany, apolitical, a
parable of the ways the dance-illiterate Jones was being honed for
civilization.

And zoned too. Because in the years since Pastures
had its première at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, since Zane died of
AIDS in 1988 and Jones himself announced he was HIV-positive, Jones
has continued to work in a territory of experiment. Citing
“dogma” as the stifling signifier of the dance scene,
he has remained on-purpose dance-illiterate. You might describe him as
amateur avant-garde. Though he