Our politicians toss around the term “the American Dream” loosely these days, but Bill T. Jones has lived that dream. Sometimes the dream has seemed more like a nightmare, but the larger arc of his life looks triumphant, a genuine fulfillment of American striving and ambition, very much in the real, waking world.

Jones rose from being the 10^th of 12 children of migrant farm workers to one of the most notable, recognized modern-dance choreographers and directors of our time. Through HIV and AIDS, which claimed the life of his longtime partner, Arnie Zane, to controversy and anger and acceptance, Jones now sits on top of the world, even if that world still sometimes seems to him unfair and unjust.

Now pushing 60, he remains a remarkably handsome man, sinewy and commanding with an angular face that might seem to belong on a coin, or a medallion, or Mount Rushmore. Back at the height of his dance career in the 70’s and 80’s, he was one of the most beautiful men many of us had ever seen. As late as 2004, the Guardian in London called him “a dancer of extraordinary grace and beauty.” But even then, he had already transcended physicality into the realms of political statement, moral fervor and intellectual contemplation. “Part showman, part philosopher,” the International Dictionary of Dance called him.

From his earlier dance experiments to his political frescos of “Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land” of 1990 and “Still/Here” of 1994 to his more recent meditations on Lincoln (and Martin Luther King and Barack Obama), from dance to Broadway with “Spring Awakening” and “Fela!,” Jones has garnered an overflowing armful of honors and awards and honorary doctorates. Now he is a Kennedy Center Honoree, but before then there was a MacArthur Award in 1994, numerous downtown dance and performance Bessie awards, the Dorothy and Lillian Gish prize in 2003 and Tonys in 2007 and 2010.

Jones was born on the day after Valentine’s in 1952 in Bunnell, Florida; the T either stands alone or for Tass. His parents, Gus and Estella, picked fruit there, traveling north every summer to Steuben County in upstate New York for the potato harvest. “I was a child of potato pickers who wept at the Civil Rights Act of 1964, who had pictures of Lincoln, Kennedy and Martin Luther King on the walls,” he wrote. “I was 12 when I saw the March on Washington with this beautiful orator, Martin Luther King, speaking and holding the world. There was hopefulness. I wanted to be part of that.”

He was raised in Steuben County and starred as a track athlete in high school. At the State University of New York in nearby Binghamton, which he attended on a special program for underprivileged students, he began to discover himself – as a gay man, as a modern dancer and as a performer and provocateur. “When I took classes in West African and African-Caribbean dancing, I started skipping track practice,” he recalls. At college he met Zane, a short, white, Jewish student devoted to photography, cross dressing and Jones, so much so that he too began taking dance classes. “We were shocking even for the Art Department,” says Jones.

After a year in Amsterdam, Jones returned to Binghamton and helped start a company called the American Dance Asylum. Jones worked in a laundry, Zane as a go-go dancer. From the first, they concentrated on a multimedia approach that transcended pure dance, exploiting their gayness and their physical differences. “Arnie was a photographer, he was painting making water-colors, I was writing poetry, I would sing, talk and dance onstage, all at once.”
They moved down near New York City in 1979, and in 1982 formed the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. “Mismatched physically, they are marvelous foils for one another,” wrote the critic Tobi Tobias. In 1983 they began their long, not-yet-ended (except for Zane’s death in 1988) relationship with the Brooklyn Academy of Music. “Intuitive Momentum,” a collaboration with the jazz drummer Max Roach and the painter Robert Longo, was part of the very first Next Wave Festival.  Zane was diagnosed with AIDS a year later, and by 1988 Jones, himself HIV-positive, was on his own.

But the ensemble, to this day still named the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, did not die. While together Zane was perceived as more the conceptualist/choreographer and Jones the dancer, though they shared in everything. Jones quickly proved himself fully adept in the conceptual and choreographic realms. The critic Deborah Jowitt had once described the Zane-Jones partnership  as “cool form with hot content.” Jones’s dance style now embraces both extremes, a determinedly eclectic blending of Afro-American folk and popular dance, modern and postmodern dance, ballet and contact improvisation. If some fault him for a lack of a distinctive movement style, he more than makes up for that with his theatrical and political ambitions. The company has always deliberately sought the widest possible diversity of races, styles and body types.

Jones’s dances in the years following Zane’s death focused on political, racial and social issues, and established his reputation for anger. He and his handlers have struggled with some success more recently to modify that image, but it did correspond to his major work in the early 90’s, as well as to his sometimes testy behavior in public forums. Chief among those works were “Last Supper,”  a BAM Next Wave commission from 1990, and “Still/Here” from 1994, the result of a residency at the venturesome Lyon Opera Ballet in 1994, which also appeared at BAM. “Last Supper” was an autobiographical fresco blending Harriet Beecher Stowe with Martin Luther King, Estella Jones chanting and, at the end, 60 naked performers onstage. Jones prefers not to dwell on the controversy now, but the critic Arlene Croce’s famous non-review of “Still/Here,” in which she proclaimed the work unreviewable as “victim art,” still rankles. Time Magazine did put him on its cover, and he won his MacArthur “genius” grant.

Jones has continued to make dances that draw attention and lead to worldwide tours, often with décor by his partner Bjorn Amelan. These have included “We Set Out Early…Visibility Was Poor” in 1998, “The Breathing Show” in 1999, a revival of “Still/Here” in 2004, “Chapel/Chapter” in 2006 (a particularly moving, less politically overt interweaving of three stories of murder and death), “A Quarreling Pair” at BAM in 2008, based on a Jane Bowles story of two middle-aged sisters, and a string of Lincoln-inspired dance-theater pieces culminating in “Fondly Do We Hope… Fervently Do We Pray” in 2009.

In 1991, Jones eased into a second, parallel, increasingly visible career as a choreographer and director for theater, musicals and opera. First was “The Mother of Three Sons,” a lurid opera conceived by him with music by the jazz composer Leroy Jenkins, seen in New York, Houston and Munich. The next year he directed Weill’s “Lost in the Stars” for the Boston Lyric Opera, in 1994 a Derek Walcott drama at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, and in 1999 a collaboration with the opera singer Jessye Norman. But his two biggest theatrical projects thus far have been his choreography for the musical based on Frank Wedekind’s “Spring Awakening” on Broadway in 2006 and his direction and choreography for the musical “Fela!,” about the Nigerian musician and Messianic politician Fela Anikulapo Kuti, first off-Broadway and then on Broadway, where it’s still running. “I was afraid my work was reaching sameness,” he said, “and Broadway made me fresh.”

All kinds of projects and performances remain on Jones’s calendar. So it came as a surprise to the dance world when a merger of his company with the venerable downtown Manhattan Dance Theater Workshop was announced earlier this year. “I am not usually a pleasant person to work with,” he conceded after the announcement. “Everything is do or die for me.” How the merger will play out, for the company and the workshop, remains to be seen. What is incontestable is that Jones’s long road, from potato-picking to international star, has no end in sight.

– John Rockwell

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Narrated by Danny Glover, the film features archival footage and interviews with Cooke’s family and intimates including Muhammad Ali, Herb Albert, James Brown, Dick Clark, Smokey Robinson, Jerry Wexler, and more.

Sam Cooke put the spirit of the Black church into popular music, creating a new American sound and setting into motion a chain of events that forever altered the course of popular music and race relations in America. With You Send Me in 1957, Cooke became the first African American artist to reach #1 on both the R&B and the pop charts. It was risky for this young gospel performer to alienate his fans by embracing “the devil’s music” – but he proved, with his pop/gospel hybrid, that it was, indeed, possible to win over white teenage listeners and keep his faithful church followers intact.

American Masters Sam Cooke: Crossing Over premiering nationally, Monday, January 11, 2010 at 9 p.m. (ET) on PBS (check local listings), features interviews with Muhammad Ali, Lou Adler, Herb Albert, James Brown, Jimmy Carter, Mel Carter, Dick Clark, Sam Moore, Earl Palmer, Billy Preston, Lou Rawls, Smokey Robinson, Jerry Wexler, Bobby Womack and more. The film is produced by John Antonelli and D. Channsin Berry and directed by Antonelli. Susan Lacy is the series creator and executive producer of American Masters. American Masters is a production of THIRTEEN in association with WNET.ORG – one of America’s most prolific and respected public media providers.

“Before Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin, Sam Cooke already heated up the charts with his unique blend of sensuality and spirituality,” says Susan Lacy, series creator and executive producer of American Masters, a seven-time winner of the Emmy Award for Outstanding Primetime Non-Fiction Series. “His smooth songs and sophisticated phrasing influenced artists from Al Green to Alicia Keys. And Cooke’s legacy reaches far beyond music boundaries. Spike Lee featured ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ in his film Malcolm X and the same song inspired President Obama’s speech. Who else besides an American Master can make such claims?”

Cooke’s career was tragically short, but meteoric at every stage. From early childhood, his silky, soaring voice electrified the congregation at his father’s First Baptist Church in Chicago. By the age of 19, he became lead vocalist for the popular gospel group The Soul Stirrers, heard in churches and jook joints and night clubs all along the Chitlin Circuit, from Chicago through the South to LA and back again. He redefined the genre and became gospel’s first iconic, and ironically, sexy superstar. Women began to flock to concerts to experience Sam, not Jesus!

Professionally, things continued to come easily to Cooke. You Send Me went gold, selling over a million records, and was followed by Soothe Me, Feel It, Bring It On Home to Me, Wonderful World, Cupid, Twistin’ the Night Away – all of which hit the charts within a two-year period. In combining two worlds, his constant challenge was to sing meaningful lyrics with the fervor of gospel and the romance of pop. He came closest with Chain Gang, observed and written during the Civil Rights era and with the poignant, biting lyrics and melody of A Change is Gonna Come in 1962, fashioned out of the depth of personal pain and loss.

Sam Cooke accomplished what no other black performer had ever even attempted, founding his own music publishing and record label, opening doors for and writing material for other artists – mentoring Aretha Franklin and launching Otis Redding. He had the courage to take an open stand against racism, refusing to perform at a segregated venue in the south and garnering the support of Dick Clark. But, his story ends abruptly at the height of his success when, at the age of 32 in 1964, he was, inexplicably, gunned down and killed in the company of a prostitute – leaving a profound legacy filled with extraordinary talent – and all the questions about what might have been.

March 5, 1943

Dear Countee:

Thanks a million for your kind letter. I am always proud to have a word of praise from you because your friendship means a great deal to me. It means so much to me because I have never known you to make an insincere move, neither for personal gain, nor for malice growing out of jealousy of anyone else. Then too, you are my favorite poet now as always since you began to write. I have always shared your approach to art. That is, you have written from within rather than to catch the eye of those who were making the loudest noise for the moment. I know that hitch-hiking on band-wagons has become the rage among Negro artists for the last ten years at least, but I have never thumbed a ride and can feel no admiration for those who travel that way. I have pointed you out on numerous occasions as one whose integrity I respected, and whose example I wished to follow.

Now, as to segregation, I have no viewpoint on the subject particularly, other than a fierce desire for human justice. The rest of it is up to the individual. Personally, I have no desire for white association except where I am sought and the pleasure is mutual. That feeling grows out of my own self-respect. However blue the eye or yellow the hair, I see no glory to myself in the contact unless there is something more than the accident of race. Any other viewpoint would be giving too much value to a mere white hide. I have offended several “liberals” among the whites by saying this bluntly. I have been infuriated by having them ask me outright, or by strong implication if I am not happy over the white left-wing associating with Negroes. I always say no. Then I invariably ask why the association should give a Negro so much pleasure? Why any more pleasure than with a black “liberal”? They never fail to flare up at that which proves that they are paying for the devout worship that many Negroes give them in the cheap coin of patronage, which proves that they feel the same superiority of race that they claim to deny. Otherwise, why assume that they have done a noble deed by having contact with Negroes? Countee, I have actually had some of them to get real confidential and point out that I can be provided with a white husband by seeing things right! White wives and husbands have been provided for others, etc.

I invariably point out that getting hold of white men has always been easy. I don’t need any help to do that. I only wish that I could get everything else so easily as I can get white men. I am utterly indifferent to the joy of other Negroes who feel that a marriage across the line is compensation for all things, even conscience. The South must laugh and gloat at the spectacle and say “I told you so! That is a black person’s highest dream.” If a white man or woman marries a Negro for love that is all right with me, but a Negro who considers himself or herself paid off and honored by it is a bit too much for me to take. So I shall probably never become a “liberal.” Neither shall I ever let myself be persuaded to have my mind made up for me by a political job. I mean to live and die by my own mind. If that is cowardly, then I am a coward. When you come to analyze it, Countee, some of the stuff that has passed as courage among Negro “leaders” is nauseating. Oh, yes, they are right there with the stock phrases, which the white people are used to and expect, and pay no attention to anymore. They are rather disappointed if you do not use them. But if you suggest something real just watch them back off from it. I know that the Anglo-Saxon mentality is one of violence. Violence is his religion. He has gained everything he has by it, and respects nothing else. When I suggest to our “leaders” that the white man is not going to surrender for mere words what he has fought and died for, and that if we want anything substantial we must speak with the same weapons, immediately they object that I am not practical.

No, no indeed. The time is not ripe, etc. etc. Just point out that we are suffering injustices and denied our rights, as if the white people did not know that already! Why don’t I put something about lynchings in my books? As if all the world did not know about Negroes being lynched! My stand is this: either we must do something about it that the white man will understand and respect, or shut up. No whiner ever got any respect or relief. If some of us must die for human justice, then let us die. For my own part, this poor body of mine is not so precious that I would not be willing to give it up for a good cause. But my own self-respect refuses to let me go to the mourner’s bench. Our position is like a man sitting on a tack and crying that it hurts, when all he needs to do is to get up off it. A hundred Negroes killed in the streets of Washington right now could wipe out Jim Crow in the nation so far as the law is concerned, and abate it at least 60% in actuality. If any of our leaders start something like that then I will be in it body and soul. But I shall never join the cry-babies.

You are right in assuming that I am indifferent to the pattern of things. I am. I have never liked stale phrases and bodyless courage. I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.

I suppose you have seen my denial of the statements of Douglas Gilbert of the World-Telegram. I know I made him sore. He is one of the type of “liberals” I spoke of. They are all Russian and want our help to put them in power in the U.S. but I know that we would be liquidated soon after they were in. They will have to get there the best way they can for all I care.

Cheerio, good luck, and a happy encounter (with me) in the near future.

Sincerely,
Zora

Document from Amistad Research Center, Tulane University.

“Zora Neale Hurston: Jump at the Sun” is available on DVD at www.newsreel.org