Jones Takes On A ‘National Malaise”

Choreographer Bill T. Jones seemingly exists to make people angry, and some in the dance world believe that Jones’s sort of controversy is exactly the sort of visceral content the genre needs to engage a public distracted by the juggernaut of pop culture. “Mr. Jones has carried himself through the rarefied world of dance with an air of enlivened majesty: speaking out, speaking often and, when speaking of himself, occasionally speaking in the third person. His comportment may partly explain why, during his more than 25-year career, his creative efforts have repeatedly been considered transgressive. But that term mischaracterizes him as an artist and perhaps even as a man, a point rendered clearly in this newest work.”