The Ongoing Legacy Of A Provocateur

Bill T. Jones is not as scary as he once was. Or maybe it’s that society has finally caught up to his way of looking at the world. In any case, the 51-year-old choreographer, who stunned the dance world with his harshly political looks at AIDS, race, and religion in the early 1990s, is still producing new works, and they are still provocative, if not quite so shocking as they used to be. Simply by enduring, Jones seems to have advanced the notion that dance can be as political as any other art form to a new acceptance within the mainstream dance community.