New York Live Arts Artistic Director Bill T. Jones with Mellon Foundation President Elizabeth Alexander. Photo by Ian Douglas.
In 2019, the iconic choreographer Bill T. Jones took a look back at the legacy of his multilayered work “D-Man in the Waters” with Mellon Foundation President Elizabeth Alexander.
For an artist grappling with an idea, “Tragedy makes things come into focus,” observed choreographer Bill T. Jones in a conversation with Mellon Foundation President Elizabeth Alexander in September 2019. At New York Live Arts, where he is artistic director, Jones told the audience how, after a devastating personal loss, he created his now-iconic D-Man in the Waters. First performed in 1989, the piece was inspired by a star dancer in the company Jones started with Arne Zane, his partner in art and life. Choreographed after Zane died of complications from AIDS, D-Man conveys “exhilaration, survival, and beauty,” as Alexander noted, and is also a study of the poetics of form.
The legacy of this multilayered work is the subject of the documentary Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters. The documentary’s co-directors, Rosalynde LeBlanc (a former dancer with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company) and Tom Hurwitz, were also on hand to introduce an extended sequence from the film, which is about a group of college-age dancers who, with LeBlanc’s guidance, must overcome the physical and emotional challenges required to learn and perform D-Man. As the conversation at New York Live Arts revealed, Jones faced a challenge of his own: how do you let go of your work to allow someone else to tell your story?
Watch highlights from the conversation in our videos below.
