The Transcendent Artistry of Dancer Bill T. Jones

Arguably the most written-about figure in the dance world of the last quarter century, Jones is inarguably the most broadly laureled, with a National Medal of Arts and a Kennedy Center Honor and Tony Awards and a Dorothy & Lillian Gish Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship and, without hyperbole, scores more. Jones has received as much praise from avant-garde aficionados (in 1998, the Village Voice critic Deborah Jowitt wrote, approvingly, of Jones’s “politically charged pieces,” in which “even beauty seems to pose an enraged challenge”) as from the mainstream (in 2009, the Times critic Ben Brantley gushed that Jones’s Broadway musical “Fela!” left audiences feeling like they “have been dancing with the stars ... And I mean astral bodies”).

From “The Transcendent Artistry of Bill T. Jones” by Wyatt Mason for The New York Times Magazine, 2016; Photo by Inez and Vinoodh

#dance #style #fashion #choreography #newyork #pose #1983 #black #gay #body #work #story #stories #thestorybar #tony #tonys #villagevoice