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Bill T. Jones

You've written that "the world is changed by transgression."
At times, it has been a credo. I once thought that what I could offer in an era of modernist innovation was authentic experience. Initially, it was nudity, and nudity can still be transgressive. When people first saw Larry Goldhuber naked on my stage [in the late '80s], that was transgressive to many people. This was not a classically pretty body; this was a fat white man naked on stage, and that offended people. In 1981, I stood on one side of the stage and said, "I love women"; I stood on the other side and said, "I hate women." I said, "I love white people," and then, "I hate white people." That was transgressive, an assault to what people thought was decent. There were things being said that were unfiltered, unaestheticized. In a time when art was losing its evocative power, my response was to bring forward real-life experience, with all its messiness and ambiguity.

Was there a cost for such candor?
I have done things that I thought later maybe were unfair to people.

How has your work changed?
I've become a more conventional artist. I am much more interested in tradition, form, history. I'm thinking a lot more about the future, all the things you might expect in a person in their middle age. There is a fight with the radical person, the young Turk who had nothing to lose, because he had nothing, and a person who now has something. So two persons are battling it out, creating what you see on the stage. There was a time when we said to hell with style; it's a trap, an affectation. Now, I realize style is something that deserves cultivation. It has been talked about a lot - the outrageousness of things that I've done - but now I'm trying to understand: How does one stay around for the long haul, and how does your work transcend your personality?

Have you changed as a dancer?
I've changed in the last 20 years. I'm dancing better now, in a deeper way, than I ever did. I ache more, and I tire maybe faster; I can't dance every day, but as a result, dance has become more hallowed.

You wrote that "my mother's praying was the first theater I ever saw and the truest."
That "sermon" on Christmas mornings was a heightened experience, a public confession. There was a ritual aspect to it. It was overwhelming. First, there was the anticipation as a child, wanting to get to the gifts, but before you got there, you had to go through this rite of passage where the sole source of control in your lives [Jones has 11 brothers and sisters] takes fire and collapses in front of her God, and then rails, goes out of self. It was frightening, but you were mesmerized and just sat there holding on to whatever piece of furniture was at hand. You just hoped that whatever this hurricane was, it didn't sweep you away. What impresses me as an artist was how she could improvise and go from the interior to the public, and then it would even soar higher to what I dare say was an ecstatic level, which is something that is dangerous in art. I've touched on it in some of my solo works, and it's something that sets the high water mark for what do you dare bring to the public sphere.

In doing pieces about death, did you ease your fear of mortality?
In Still/Here and other pieces, I allowed myself to be public in my concerns about it; and while I won't say I'm cured of anxiety about death, it certainly did make it easier to go on with my life, having invited it into the work. Now, if tomorrow I have a strange lump or something doesn't feel right, I'll still feel panic, but I believe it would not be of the same magnitude as it might have been before. [Jones has been HIV-positive for approximately 15 years; his longtime partner and collaborator Arnie Zane died of AIDS in 1988.]

Is there something you long to do that you haven't, a dream?
Of course, I want to make something great [laughing]; ask any artist. I want to make a masterpiece. That aside, I'd like to be able to make my mother feel secure in her old age. My companion and I - there is something about building a nest and the way we like to live involving beauty, order. There's a house of the imagination that's just out of reach financially now, but something I would like to have. Mundane, right? The thrills I want are intellectual and emotional, and I want to feel the ecstasy; I want the great ecstasy.

Any feelings about turning 50 next year?
No, but my company is going to be celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2003: That number has resonance for me - we've survived all that time. At age 50, when I do a solo show, and I come off stage and realize I did that all by myself, and I expended a lot of energy, then 50 will be something I'll wear as a badge of courage.

Final thoughts?
I truly believe the body wants to move, and the heart and the body want to move together and do something joyous. There's one constant in the world and that is change, but there's still in the heart of the world something that is mysterious and life-giving and, I dare say, beautiful.