"The Promised Land"
Jones has become one of the most powerful artists of our time, and he becomes ever stronger as he uses his art to delve openly, and publicly, into his own personal quest for understanding and meaning. He's black, gay, HIV-positive, and he lost his longtime lover and company co-founder to AIDS two years ago. The anger he feels is everywhere present in this piece, and he's not afraid to show it.
As enigmatic as it is gripping, it's a work that eludes easy interpretation, yet leaves some of the most indelible images in memory, haunting pictures of bodies, naked and partially naked, roiling en masse in angry, agitated waves of fierce energy bursting into renewed life, a "Rite of Spring" in the Age of AIDS.
- MIKE STEELE, 1990
"Dream on Monkey Mountain"
There's hardly a moment in Bill T. Jones' rendition of the script by Nobel Prize-winning poet Derek Walcott that isn't open to debate -- the jarring appropriation of racist images and stereotypes, the kinetic power that often confronts and even argues with Walcott's textual music, the attempt in Jones' epilogue to kick Walcott's Caribbean calypso beat into the boombox, hip-hop mean streets of today. Yet overarching any individual arguments is the sheer sweep of Jones' production, its audacity, its sheer theatrical drive, the riveting way it physicalizes while still honoring Walcott's look at the complex cultural interweavings and inherent tensions of a colonized people seeking salvation.
- MIKE STEELE, 1994
What a voyage of discovery "You Walk?" could have been. But instead of promoting understanding and providing insight into cultural conflict or transformation, the work's sheer volume of movement, text, scores and visuals becomes tedious, even numbing at times. In a piece combining so many sources, references and mediums, Jones would benefit by exercising restraint and self-discipline in order to clearly convey his intent. "You Walk?" asks viewers for their blind faith in Jones' vision. But despite its ambition, powerful dancing and moments of aesthetic beauty, the piece may not convert all the skeptics in the audience.
- CAMILLE LEFEVRE, 2001
"As I Was Saying"
Avatar isn't a word heard much these days. But Bill T. Jones owns it. In the world premiere of "As I Was Saying," the dancer/choreographer ventures where lesser mortals often fear to tread. Surprised? We shouldn't be. We should know by now that every muscle of his body, honed to sculptural perfection, works in service to his meaty, fluid, sinuous, evocative choreography.
