Story/Time: The Life of an Idea

by Bill T. Jones

Overview

An autobiographical meditation on art from the world-renowned dancer and choreographer

In this ceaselessly questioning book, acclaimed African American dancer, choreographer, and director Bill T. Jones reflects on his art and life as he describes the genesis of Story/Time, a recent dance work produced by his company and inspired by the modernist composer and performer John Cage. Presenting personally revealing stories, richly illustrated with striking color photographs of the work's original stage production, and featuring a beautiful, large-format design, the book is a work of art in itself.

Like the dance work, Story/Time the book is filled with telling vignettes—about Jones’s childhood as part of a large, poor, Southern family that migrated to upstate New York; about his struggles to find a place for himself in a white-dominated dance world; and about his encounters with notable artists and musicians. In particular, Jones examines his ambivalent attraction to avant-garde modernism, which he finds liberating but also limiting in its disregard for audience response. As he strives to make his work more personal and broadly engaging, especially to an elusive African American audience, Jones—who is still drawn to the avant-garde—wrestles with questions of how an artist can remain true to himself while still caring about the popular reception of his work.

A provocative meditation on the demands and rewards of artistic creation, Story/Time is an inspiring and enlightening portrait of the life and work of one of the great artists of our time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691162706
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	09/07/2014
Series:	The Toni Morrison Lecture Series
Pages:	120
Sales rank:	901,741
Product dimensions:	7.80(w) x 10.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Bill T. Jones is an acclaimed dancer, choreographer, and director. He is the artistic director, cofounder, and choreographer of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and executive artistic director of New York Live Arts. He is the recipient of many awards and honors, including Tony Awards for FELA! and Spring Awakening, a Kennedy Center Honor, and a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2014, President Barack Obama awarded Jones the National Medal of Arts, the country's highest honor for achievement in the arts.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Preface ix

Past Time 1

Story/Time 19

With Time 97

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Bill T. Jones has always been on the forefront of powerful hybrid art forms, whether it's politics and dance or Broadway and edgy. In Story/Time, he spins John Cage. A master of timing, Jones applies Cage's rigor to his own work, adding his own style and warmth. Story/Time's choreographed language is a beautiful new realm."—Laurie Anderson

"One of America's iconic dancers and choreographers gives us an insight into his inspirations and processes, in a series of vivid vignettes of being, thinking, and doing, which is to say, of living. A fascinating text."—Salman Rushdie

"A miraculous time spent in the company of Bill T. Jones, as he questions, conjectures, and responds to the words, thoughts, and works of John Cage. It is a gift to the world of ideas, and to us all."—Damian Woetzel, director of the Aspen Institute Arts Program

"Jones's honesty and unmistakable voice reveal his artistic struggle to find his place in relationship to Cage, an artist whose ideas and teachings he both admires and questions. This rich document offers the reader access to the life, work, and creative processes of this important and influential American choreographer."—Susan Marshall, director of dance at Princeton University's Lewis Center for the Arts and artistic director of Susan Marshall & Company

Editorial Reviews

One of The Skanner Newspaper’s Ten Best Black Books of 2014

From the Publisher

11/01/2014
Dancer, choreographer, and director Jones talks about the creation of Story/Time, a recent dance work inspired by John Cage, as well as his own childhood and career. (LJ 8/14)

Library Journal

2014-06-25
An experimental dancer/choreographer/performance artist improvises on the nature of story itself in a unique format.Derived from Jones’ presentations at Princeton University for the Toni Morrison Lectures in 2012, the text is a hybrid. There is some introductory material explaining what follows—material that credits John Cage’sIndeterminacy(1958) for inspiration. (The author returns to consider Cage continually.) The central—and largest section—is a series of 60 single-page narratives, each designed to consume a minute of dance and reading. Jones has used a computer’s random sorting program to arrange the narratives, so readers need to be alert as they move from page to page, for time and location and theme change rapidly, and chronology is an anachronism. In one 10-page segment, we move from a New Mexico mesa, to news about a friend’s death, to acquiring old family photographs, to John Cage’s diary, to a visit to Theresienstadt, to an amateur porn film. Readers become participants, seeking sense, as if looking at an unfamiliar landscape through the windows of a swiftly moving train. Each narrative, however, has an emotional core that readers will feel, sometimes quite powerfully. Another major section is a collection of black-and-white photographs of the performances. We see the performers, an image of time from a digital clock, and the author, seated at a small table, reading his narratives from a loose-leaf binder. The images conclude with a performer lying on the floor, mist swirling around. In the final section, Jones reflects on what he has done, tells how he began as a dancer and choreographer, and returns again to Cage, including a brief transcript of a conversation with Laura Kuhn, the John Cage Professor of Performance Art at Bard College.A brave and often successful attempt to capture and display movement and intuition and the unspoken on the printed page.

Kirkus Reviews