AEGiS-BKREV: Last Night on Earth

Last Night on Earth

Pantheon Books/Random House, 201 E. 50th St., New York, NY. 286p., illus. ISBN 0-679-43926-9. $30.00.
Bill T. Jones with Peggy Gillespie. 1995.

With the help of a free-lance journalist, Peggy Gillespie, Bill T. Jones takes us on a visual trip of his life as a choreographer with his beloved friend Arnie Zane. Bill and Arnie formed the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, touring the world as a duet dance team. Their choreographed productions were emotional and powerful. Arnie died in 1988, but Bill continued to dance even though he was HIV positive. Last Night on Earth is a "performance in text" that documents the creation of several of his pieces. It is a personal, historical document that tells his life as he lived and remembered it. "Jones illuminates the process through which his work has become a way of expressing profound emotion; of exploring ideas around memory, sexuality, race, and mortality; of imposing order and beauty on chaos and despair." His piece, Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land, is biographical and moving. It shows the power that Jones has in creating a performance that sticks in your mind by making you uneasy. He writes: "My history is a fragmented chronology that divides me from my past, from my mother's faith, from the hopeful naivete of the sixties counterculture. I decided that Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land would acknowledge this division and attempt to go past it. This work, with its fragmented black voice, would strive to speak to the broadest, most varied audience. It would speak about being human. About how we are the places we have been, the people we have slept with. How we are what we have lost and what we dream for."

This is a beautiful book by a young man who came from a share crop family and became one of the world's most acclaimed dancers. Jones has been the recipient of two New York Dance and Performance (Bessie ) Awards, a Dorothy B. Chandler Performing Arts Award, the Dance Magazine award, and, in 1994, a MacArthur Fellowship. He lives in a small town outside of New York City. A highly recommended book for all libraries, documenting the joys and sadness of someone who is so talented.

Keywords: Choreographers, Biography, Dancers

970130
BK970618

Copyright © 1997 - The University of Illinois at Chicago. All materials in the journal are subject to copyright by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois and may be reprinted or redistributed for the noncommercial purpose of scientific or educational advancement granted by Sections 107 and 108 of the Copyright Revision Act of 1976. For other reprinting, redistribution, or translation, address requests to H. Robert Malinowsky, University of Illinois at Chicago Library, PO Box 8198, Chicago, IL 60680 or electronically to hrm@uic.edu.

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