Bill T. Jones: The Maverick Hits the Mainstream
by Chad Jones

Bill T. Jones, a dance world maverick, stood onstage at the 2007 Tony Awards, clutching an award presented for choreographing the hit Broadway musical Spring Awakening and thanked people living and dead. He ended his energetic speech, which was preceded by vigorous hugs for presenters Bebe Neuwirth and David Hyde Pearce (not to mention the nameless woman who holds the awards), with, "I am a happy man!"

Surprising words, perhaps, to anyone who has followed Jones's journey through the dance world. Could the man who so loved pushing boundaries--and hot buttons--with his muscular, avant garde dance really be happy working in the money-driven world of the commercial theatre?

The answer is, well, yes. Bill T. Jones, 56, has always been a magnet for controversy because his work--done largely through his company, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company--is so personal and deals with everything from sexuality and race to his HIV-positive status.

The New York Times recently called Jones "the political lion of modern dance." So how did such a downtown guy end up swimming through the uptown mainstream?

"It was all very mysterious," Jones says on the phone before a preview performance of Fela!, an off-Broadway musical about Nigerian bandleader Fela Anikulapo Kuti that Jones is both directing and choreographing.

"I had recently switched management to Creative Artists Agency, and I got this call. [Producer] Tom Hulce came to one of my company's rehearsals, and on the way there we shared a cab. He said he had a project he'd like me to consider, a play by Frank Wedekind involving kids that is outrageous. It might be interesting, he said. It's about sexual awakening and repression. I just rolled my eyes because this is such a permissive era with teen pregnancy and drug abuse. I was not at all sure about people relating to teens being repressed."

Wedekind's Spring Awakening began life as a controversial play in late 19th-century Germany, and its journey toward becoming a hit Broadway musical began around the turn of the 21st century when book writer and lyricist Steven Sater and composer Duncan Sheik had the idea to infuse the play with pop-rock songs. It would be a different kind of musical, one in which the songs interrupted the story more than furthered it.

Director Michael Mayer came aboard, and the seemingly endless workshop cycle began. Then Jones agreed to join the creative team at the request of Mayer, a longtime fan who admired Jones's gestural vocabulary and his movement work with non-dancers.

Jones had worked in musical theatre once before in 2006 when he choreographed Will Power's The Seven, a hip-hop adaptation of Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes. (Jones joined the show in New York after its 2001 San Francisco run at Thick Description, where the choreographer was Robert Henry Johnson.)

Jones came in to choreograph Spring Awakening for its initial off-Broadway run at New York's Atlantic Theatre Company and found himself working with a young cast of mostly non-dancers.

"I always assumed everyone on Broadway was a triple threat," Jones says. "That's not always true. But everything with me begins as a discussion, so we talked about the songs and the emotions, and movement developed out of that."

Bay Area audiences will be among the first to see the national tour of Spring Awakening, which plays September 4 through October 12 at San Francisco's Curran Theatre as part of the SHN/Best of Broadway season. The tour previewed in San Diego, but the San Francisco run is considered the official launch of the tour.

Jones lived in San Francisco on Potrero Hill in the early '70s and remembers hitchhiking with friend and fellow modern dancer Lois Welk down to San Mateo to take workshops from a Paul Taylor Dance Company member.

"Some of the exercises we learned in those workshops I used with the actors in Spring Awakening both on Broadway and on tour," Jones says. "Things like weight sharing and community building."

One of Jones' siblings (he is the 10th of 12 children) also lives in San Francisco: Rhodessa Jones, a founder of the Cultural Odyssey performance group and the Medea Project, a theatre program for incarcerated women.

Bill T. Jones says he hopes to be able to come to San Francisco while Spring is here and to see his sister, but with Fela! opening in early September, the timing is off.

"Every time Rho and I are in the same place, creativity happens," Jones says. "We always keep an eye out for something to work on together."

With two such powerful performers coming out of the same family, one has to wonder if other members of the Jones clan are doing great things for the arts.

"I joke everybody in my family has written a novel or a play or someone was a singer in high school who became a mother with a notion of someday returning to the stage," Jones says. "Rho and I are just crazy enough to actually throw ourselves into it."

Since his defection to the theatre, Jones has heard gripes from the dance community. But he insists he hasn't chosen theatre over dance or vice versa.

"I was never in any one camp," he says. "I've always done my own thing, and I've always had this troubling tendency to be abstract. I say this: You go into anything as an artist, and that negotiates the paradigm of what one thinks and one does, what is inside and what is outside. Each new work demands the ability to articulate and to question, and to find challenging ways of answering those questions. Is the answer a show-stopping number? Or is it one person on stage not talking and just gesturing? The answer is in the imagination, and you place it at the mercy of the mission of the piece."

For Spring Awakening, Jones envisioned rebellious teens body checking each other and working out their angst in physical ways, even if that meant breaking furniture. But being an auteur and head of one's own company is quite different than working in a collaborative machine governed by union rules and regulations.

"I'd come up with something then realize that the movement interfered with the singing of the song," Jones says. "The biggest difference with this work was having a story control everything that happens onstage. In my world you can have three things going on that don't have any relationship to each other, and that's a virtue. The audience engages by creating their own personal narrative and connection. A musical is very linear, and it's about the storytelling. I had to make my own peace with that."

Now, with Fela!, Jones is developing his own fusion of song, dance and story, and, like he said at the Tonys, he's happy.

"I have a belligerent streak in me, it's true," he says. "I'm not a young boy anymore, and I don't expect the world to want me to win, if it ever did. I never expected a Tony Award, and I'm proud of the work I did to get it. I'm grateful that even in one's middle age, life still has surprises, but you have to be willing to engage, to be a good listener. I realize I'm still a bit of a student. I'm learning about new conventions and traditions. That is exciting. I can still learn."

For information on Spring Awakening visit shnsf.com.

Chad Jones is a Bay Area theatre writer for TheaterDogs.net and examiner.com/san_francisco. Reach him at chiatovich@gmail.com.