Bill T. Jones-Arnie Zane Dance Company

Two-time Tony Award™ winner and contemporary performance icon Bill T. Jones returns for year two of his GAMMAGE RESIDENCY.  Jones will present Body Against Body, which revives and reconsiders the duets and solos that launched Jones and Zane on the international dance scene of the early 80s and redefined the dance landscape of the day. These pieces remain some of the most significant examples of postmodern performance. Both physically and conceptually rigorous, they challenge performer and viewer through their notions of task-based movement and non-narrative structure. Body Against Body explores the uncompromising balance of seemingly conflicting ideas underlying all of the company's work: challenge or cooperation, structuralism versus pure athletics, abstract formality against raw introspective words.

Program features three works from Body Against Body performed together for the very first time:

Blauvelt Mountain (A Fiction) (1980, reconstructed 2002)
One of the first duets that Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane created together, Blauvelt Mountain capitalizes on the disparities and specificities between distinct body types, often placing one person in a position of dependency. Eccentric and occasionally humorous tableaux, casual conversations, and word associations are paired with rigorous partnering sequences to suggest the mental and emotional engagement, heightened awareness, and intimacy necessary for successful partnering.

Monkey Run Road (1979, reconstructed 2011)
The earliest of the Body Against Body duets, Monkey Run Road reveals the early dance-making concerns of Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane. Traces of the duo’s background in jiu-jitsu, social dancing, photography, and contact improvisation are readily seen in the piece, where repetitive, athletic phrases are punctuated by minimalist tasks and fragments of dialogue.

Valley Cottage (1980/1981, reconstructed 2011)
A Study is an intimate duet that blends the demanding, post-modern movement vocabulary of Jones and Zane with original spoken text by current Company members. Through authentic, often poignant and occasionally humorous anecdotes, the dancers reveal their individual personalities and relationships with each other - just as Jones and Zane did in the early ‘80s when they first created this evocative duet.

Made possible in part by Way Family Foundation, Margaret T. Morris Foundation and APS.

Special thanks to residency and production partners ASU Project Humanities and the ASU School of Dance.

All performances, dates, times and prices are subject to change.