Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Co. to perform at CU-Boulder Jan. 22
‘Play and Play’ fuses highly kinetic dance and classical music
Bill T. Jones has been performing and creating powerful dance pieces for more than four decades and the renowned multi-cultural company he formed with Arnie Zane debuted in 1982.
Zane died tragically young in 1988, but Jones, 63, is still going strong as the creative force behind the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Co., which will perform Play and Play, a fusion of dance and classical music, at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 22 at Macky Auditorium at the University of Colorado Boulder.
The company will perform three pieces:
Spent Days Out Yonder (2001) is a meditation on the second movement of Mozart’sString Quartet No. 23 in F Major. “The music seemed to move in supple waves through the dancers’ bodies, and the effect was something like a pastoral landscape. The dancers inhabiting it were not so much people as representations of the rhythms of nature,” says The New Yorker.
Continuous Replay (1977, 1991) explores Zane’s interest in photography and film. Originally choreographed by Zane as a solo, Jones later revised it as a group work incorporating Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 18 No. 1 and String Quartet Op. 135. The piece “is a thorough primer in Jones/Zane style: sharp versus flowing, large versus small, straight versus angled.” (The New York Times)
D-Man in the Waters(1989; revised 1998), set Mendelssohn’s Octet in E-flat Major for Strings, Op. 20, is a joyful, energy piece celebrating love, loss, hope and triumph. “Rarely has one seen a dance company throw itself onto the stage with such kinetic exaltation,” writes The New York Times.
Student musicians from the CU-Boulder College of Music will perform the score.
“Any time you get to collaborate across the arts it’s an exciting opportunity,” says Zachary Reaves, cellist for the graduate-student ensemble Altius Quartet. “And it’s really great to see a dance company using live music; a lot of them don’t these days.”
Photo: D-Man in the Waters by Paul B. Goode
Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Co —Play and Play
A program of the Artist Series
When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 22
Where: Macky Auditorium, CU-Boulder campus
Tickets: $14 and up
Box office: cupresents.org or call 303-492-8008, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mon.-Fri.