Do Not Miss Peak Performances at Montclair

Although he has won two Tony Awards for choreography and a Kennedy Center Honor-all while maintaining his dance company, Valley Cottages' very own Bill T. Jones has been and continues to be a quiet source of pride and joy for us Rocklanders who have an appreciation for the arts. Especially the world of dance, the theatre and the musical arts.

Mr. Jones was born in 1952 in Steuben County, upstate New York. As a young man with a theatre major on an athletic scholarship to the State University of New York at Binghamton, he eventually enrolled in dance classes and studied with Percival Borde. This was inevitable.

In 1971, Bill T. Jones met his longtime love(r), partner and companion Arnie Zane. Together, they choreographed and performed solos and duets and were quite openly gay in their works, collaborations and their lives.

In 1981, they envisioned and founded the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane and Co. which became the perfect devise for their innovative, energetic, poignant and very post- modernistic dances, many of which were set to text/narrative and even more post-modern music. The very next year, their company performed at the Next Wave Festival at BAM. Through the years, Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane were both recipients of awards and honors too numerous to detail here. The recognition and admiration they earned and enjoyed was and is legendary. Bill credits John Cage as his muse.

Inspired by Cages' Indeterminacy (a spoken word piece based on chance) first performed in 1958, Bill T. Jones has now created Story/Time- a co-commission of Peak Performances and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Each performance of Story/Time is 70 minutes long, contains 50-70 stories and some silences and is a piece which Mr. Jones and his 60 year old knees can handle! Surrounded by his 9 member troupe, Mr. Jones' version places him onstage at a desk, reading his own series of mostly autobiographical stories. Truly a thoughtful life well lived, loved and danced!

He is that rare bird who has managed to jump back and forth over the great divide, making accessible to any interested person, a conversation, a dialogue if you will- a discourse on politics and policy, love and loss, living and dying.

To find out more about these special and very limited engagement performances at Montclair State University on January 26,27,28 and 29th go to:  

peakperfs@mail.montclair.edu

Box office 1-973-655-5112