Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company The Phantom Project 20th Anniversary Season

"20 years of spellbinding magic."--New York Times

Celebrate the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company's 20th anniversary at this concert, a highlight of our dance season. Bill T. Jones is revisiting many of the group's landmark works for this special tour. Since Columbus audiences are familiar with important compositions from the nineties (such as Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land and the riveting Still/Here, which was created during a Wexner Center residency), we selected pieces from the earlier years, made with Arnie Zane, Jones's then partner in life and art. Completing the program is a brand new work that reveals Jones's current directions and how they spring from the sum of his experiences to date.

Blauvelt Mountain (A Fiction) is one of the duets that first signaled Jones and Zane's arrival in the dance world. Its fierce partnering mirrors the magnetic charge of their relationship and the wild disparities in their physical presences and personalities. In Another Another History of Collage, Jones reimagines Another History of Collage, the last piece Zane contributed to before succumbing to AIDS. Originally created in 1988, the work recalls the excitement the two artists shared as they set out to reconsider dance spectacle during the eighties' art scene.

Our program concludes with Mercy 10 X 8 on a Circle, the pure dance companion piece to Jones's most recent dance theater epic. Set to Glenn Gould's performance of Beethoven's 32 Variations on an Original Theme in C Minor, this new full company work employs sweeping circular patterning and vivid partnering. Its pairings of very different body types and sizes of dancers echo the impulse behind Blauvelt Mountain. As you are enthralled by the dancers' agile clarity, you'll revel in how Jones extends the joyous lyrical dynamism that has been the hallmark of his choreography and established his reputation as one of his generation's most vital dance makers.

Recommended for mature audiences.

Presented by the Wexner Center in association with The King Arts Complex.