Tony Award Winner Bill T. Jones returns to campus after Broadway accolade

Skidmore College and Capital District audiences are among the first to see and hear more from Tony Award-winning choreographer Bill T. Jones, who is starting the second week of a three-week residency at the College.

Jones, who lit up the Radio City Music Hall stage with an exuberant acceptance speech during Sunday's nationally televised awards presentation, was honored for the riveting choreography he created for Spring Awakening, the smash musical hit about the dawning loves and lives of students in 19th century Germany. Then dancer/choreographer Jones, who had already picked up an Off-Broadway “Obie” for Spring Awakening, traveled back to the College, where his company is in the middle of its third summer dance residency.

At Skidmore, his 10-dancer company, internationally acclaimed for its original movement and theatrical flair, is spending creative time developing new work, teaching a workshop for pre-professional dancers, and presenting a full slate of public events that offer a rare chance to catch a Tony Award-winner up close, in action.

In fact, a work-in-progress glimpse into a new Jones work—one co-commissioned by Skidmore and destined to premiere during the company’s upcoming 25th anniversary season—will begin at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, June 16, in Skidmore’s Bernhard Theater. The performance is a headline event of SaratogaArtsFest, the new community-wide festival of visual, literary, and performing arts that will debut June 15-17. Click here for ArtsFest details.

Additional residency events include the following:
• an open company rehearsal at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, June 13, in the Dance Theater
• the induction of Bill T. Jones into the National Museum of Dance Hall of Fame, Saratoga Springs, at 6 p.m. Friday, June 15. Call 518-584-2225, ext. 3001, for reservations.
• a dance dialogue and demonstration with Bill T. Jones and director/choreographer David Gordon, at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, June 20, in the Dance Theater. Gordon, best known for the avant-garde Punch and Judy Get Divorced, is collaborating in the development of the company’s new dance work.

The residency will also offer a showing by workshop students at 2 p.m., Friday, June 22, in the Dance Theater, and a series of tai chi classes at 6:30 June 12, 14,18, 19, and 21, and at 9:30 a.m. Saturday, June 16, in the Dance Center. For more information, call Skidmore's Office of the Dean of Special Programs at 518-580-5590.

Jones forged his own dance style, deliberately working outside the modern-dance idioms developed by Martha Graham, Paul Taylor, Alvin Ailey, and other greats. He continued to create galvanizing new work after dance partner and co-founder Arnie Zane’s death, drawing freely and deeply on an array of avant-garde art forms, including music and post-modern film. Many of his best-known works employ spoken text and stage spectacle as well as dance movement to explore such powerful issues as race ( Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land), political and moral concerns ( Blind Date), life and death (D-Man in the Waters, Still/Here).

The Harlem-based company has performed its repertory of more than 140 works in 30 countries around the world and received six New York Dance and Performance Awards (“Bessies”), among other honors. Jones’s many accolades and awards include a 1994 MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant and designation as one of America’s “Irreplaceable Dance Treasures” by the Dance Heritage Foundation. In 2005, Jones received the Wexner Prize, given to artists who have been “consistently original, influential, and challenging to convention.”