Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company was in residence in September 1998 and engaged in 16 educational and community programs as well as performing a new work, We Set Out Early . . . Visibility Was Poor at Northrop Auditorium. The company appeared in conjunction with the Walker's exhibition Art Performs Life: Merce Cunningham/Meredith Monk/Bill T. Jones.

During the residency, Jones and company members lead numerous public and private community activities, including forums, workshops, lecture-demonstrations, master classes, and post-performance discussions. Jones participated in a forum on art and race with leaders in the African-American community, and lead workshops and discussions with emerging local artists at Intermedia Arts and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. . . .

Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company was in residence in September 1998 and engaged in 16 educational and community programs as well as performing a new work, We Set Out Early . . . Visibility Was Poor at Northrop Auditorium. The company appeared in conjunction with the Walker's exhibition Art Performs Life: Merce Cunningham/Meredith Monk/Bill T. Jones.

During the residency, Jones and company members lead numerous public and private community activities, including forums, workshops, lecture-demonstrations, master classes, and post-performance discussions. Jones participated in a forum on art and race with leaders in the African-American community, and lead workshops and discussions with emerging local artists at Intermedia Arts and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Additionally, the company conducted classes and lectures with Twin Cities youth, including events at the Minnesota Center for Arts Education and Dunwoody Institute. The residency marked the start of an intensified eight-year annual commitment between the Walker and the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company to make Minneapolis a "home away from home."

American, b. 1952
A courageous, at times conflicted, choreographer, Bill T. Jones has deftly balanced social/political concerns with abstract work of formal beauty and complexity. Together with partner Arnie Zane, he helped introduce elements now common in contemporary dance: partnering between men; the casting of...

American, b. 1952
A courageous, at times conflicted, choreographer, Bill T. Jones has deftly balanced social/political concerns with abstract work of formal beauty and complexity. Together with partner Arnie Zane, he helped introduce elements now common in contemporary dance: partnering between men; the casting of dancers of all shapes, sizes, and colors; involvement of entire communities (professional performers and amateurs alike) in the creation of key works; use of spoken text and movement simultaneously; an exploration of autobiographical truths in his work (presaging much of the identity politics of the 80s and 90s); and the use of a full amalgam of movement styles and collaborative strategies.

The struggle between the literal and the abstract, the political and the formal, the angry and the cool, have always fed Jones’s work. The son of migrant Southern Baptist farm workers, Jones and Zane began unorthodox explorations of contact improvisation and personal revelation soon after they met in 1971. Rejecting the austere prescriptions of the Judson Dance innovators of the time, they embraced narrative, pop music, fashion, sets, costumes, and full theatricality.

Jones has spent a life confronting the issues that he has often said “unite us outside of the aesthetic”—the cultural and historical struggles that continue to define the country and its people. In recent decades, he and the Walker have grown up together. His often painful struggle balancing what he feels are the responsibilities of an engaged citizen with the pure commitment to his art have only served to make his work richer, more emotionally engaged, and increasingly profound. He is an artist and public figure who gives one hope in sometimes hopeless-feeling times.