The intimately-scaled work The Table Project was commissioned by the Walker Art Center in 2001 and received its world premiere in the shared Walker/Guthrie Theater lobby as part of its monthly Free First Saturday program. While in residence, Jones and his namesake dance company developed and finalized this new piece, and also presented his new evening-length work, You Walk? (at Northrop Auditorium), took part in a Talking Dance evening with curator Philip Bither, oversaw the Anderson Window Gallery exhibition Bill T. Jones: Artist-in-Residence, and taught beginning movement workshops for aspiring dancers.

An eight-minute dance for six people, set to a live performance of Franz Schubert's Trio in E-flat Major op. 148 Notturno (performed live by Minneapolis’ Bakken Trio), The Table Project explored the conventions and expectations built around age and gender, consisting of the same movements performed four times consecutively by community members, first a group of men aged fifty to sixty-five, then by a group of girls aged eight to eleven, then boys, and finally by older women. After a long recruitment process, twenty-nine local “nonperformers” were selected to take part in the work, rehearsing for several weeks in order to master the simple movements, yet delicate timing required. The structure itself was designed by Creative Director and sculptor Bjorn Amelan, and built on-site by Walker crews.

Stepping hand-in-hand up and over the surface of the table, the performers’ movements were marked by a guileless innocence, its repetitiveness almost a meditation, allowing ample room for a consideration of the ideas behind the work and a clear-eyed view of the individuals enacting the story. The touching performance became a new vehicle by which Jones and his company could involve communities with their work while on tour. . . .

The intimately-scaled work The Table Project was commissioned by the Walker Art Center in 2001 and received its world premiere in the shared Walker/Guthrie Theater lobby as part of its monthly Free First Saturday program. While in residence, Jones and his namesake dance company developed and finalized this new piece, and also presented his new evening-length work, You Walk? (at Northrop Auditorium), took part in a Talking Dance evening with curator Philip Bither, oversaw the Anderson Window Gallery exhibition Bill T. Jones: Artist-in-Residence, and taught beginning movement workshops for aspiring dancers.

An eight-minute dance for six people, set to a live performance of Franz Schubert's Trio in E-flat Major op. 148 Notturno (performed live by Minneapolis’ Bakken Trio), The Table Project explored the conventions and expectations built around age and gender, consisting of the same movements performed four times consecutively by community members, first a group of men aged fifty to sixty-five, then by a group of girls aged eight to eleven, then boys, and finally by older women. After a long recruitment process, twenty-nine local “nonperformers” were selected to take part in the work, rehearsing for several weeks in order to master the simple movements, yet delicate timing required. The structure itself was designed by Creative Director and sculptor Bjorn Amelan, and built on-site by Walker crews.

Stepping hand-in-hand up and over the surface of the table, the performers’ movements were marked by a guileless innocence, its repetitiveness almost a meditation, allowing ample room for a consideration of the ideas behind the work and a clear-eyed view of the individuals enacting the story. The touching performance became a new vehicle by which Jones and his company could involve communities with their work while on tour. Audiences from New York City to Berkeley were uniformly fascinated and moved by its simple statement, which confounded stereotypes and offered a celebration of shared humanity.

“I’ve been attracted to Schubert’s Piano Trio for some time because of its bold yet concise structure with an inevitable sense of sweep with moods ranging from introspective, pathetic to majestic. I would like to create a distilled iconographic event within the...

“I’ve been attracted to Schubert’s Piano Trio for some time because of its bold yet concise structure with an inevitable sense of sweep with moods ranging from introspective, pathetic to majestic. I would like to create a distilled iconographic event within the range of non-expert performers. It is my hope that this structure will grow out of simple movement instructions that will exploit the ziggurat table-like structure for its architectural and evocative properties. I’m interested in breaking down the human population along age and gender lines out of a curiosity to understand how these two characteristics effect our perception of movement, time, and emotion.” – Bill T. Jones on The Table Project

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.