The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company isn’t just touring this season; it’s time-traveling through its own history to ask what art is for in a world on fire.
A landmark company, a landmark work
Now in its 44th year, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company is taking four distinct programs to eight U.S. cities from February 26 through May 1, with more dates to come. At the center of the 2025–2026 tour is the remount of “Still/Here,” the “American classic” that the New York Times once called a landmark of 20th‑century dance. Created during the AIDS crisis, the work famously blurred the line between the personal and the political, and helped define an American form of dance theater built from testimony, gesture, and multimedia.
Jones has never pretended that art exists in a vacuum. “Art-making seems so futile right now, but art-making is defiance,” he said. “Art and culture can affect profound change—through hearts and minds, not policies or executive orders … The personal is political.” That conviction frames this tour: a veteran company revisiting its past to make sense of a present shaped by pandemics, war, climate crisis, and rising authoritarianism.
“Still/Here”: survival as choreography
“Still/Here” grew out of “Survival Workshops: Talking and Moving about Life and Death,” held with people living with life‑threatening illnesses. Their words and gestures became the material of the piece: spoken text, video portraits, and movement embedded in Gretchen Bender’s visual environment, with music by Kenneth Frazelle (sung by Odetta) and Vernon Reid. The result is a highly formal structure delivered with striking simplicity — an elegy, a document, and an act of witness.
The current staging features company members Barrington Hinds, Jada Jenai, Shane Larson, Danielle Marshall, Jacoby Pruitt, Babou Sanneh, Hannah Seiden, Mak Thornquest, Wyeth Walker, and Rosa Allegra Wolff, tracing those original “survival” gestures in a world where questions about mortality feel newly immediate.
Looking back to look forward
The tour doesn’t stop at “Still/Here.” Three other works map the company’s lineage and its restless experimentation.
“Continuous Replay” (originally Arnie Zane’s 1977 solo “Hand Dance,” later expanded by Jones in 1991) is built from 45 precise gestures, layered and complicated over time. It reflects Zane’s roots in photography and film; a kind of living time‑lapse scored by Jerome Begin’s string octet, which folds Beethoven motifs into an unexpected soundscape.
“Story/” continues the company’s deep dive into John Cage-style indeterminacy. It pairs a menu of movement phrases with Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” string quartet, performed live, so structure and chance continually re‑negotiate each other.
“Collage Revisited” (1988, 2025) revisits “The History of Collage,” Jones and Zane’s last collaboration before Zane’s death. Dreamlike and cinematic, it plays with past and present, fantasy and nightmare, and reasserts Zane’s influence — and that of a generation of artists lost to AIDS — as “resolutely inextricable from the present.”
Together, these works stage a conversation across decades: what it meant to make radical dance in the 1980s, what it meant in the 1990s, and what it means now.
A choreographer still in motion
At 74, Bill T. Jones remains unusually active for an artist with two Tonys, a National Medal of Arts, a Kennedy Center Honor, a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, and more. He continues to lead the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company as artistic director, co‑founder, and choreographer while also serving as artistic director of New York Live Arts in New York City. The tour is as much about sustaining a living repertory as it is about introducing new audiences to a body of work that has shaped contemporary performance for nearly half a century.
Where the tour lands
From February 26 through May 1, the company brings different configurations of “Still/Here,” “Continuous Replay,” “Story/,” and “Collage Revisited” to the Meany Center for the Performing Arts in Seattle, CAP UCLA in Los Angeles, Wisconsin Union Theater in Madison, K‑State McCain Auditorium and Lied Center in Kansas, Hopkins Center at Dartmouth, Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, and UMASS Fine Arts Center in Amherst, with screenings, master classes, and additional events folded into select stops.
The tour itself becomes a kind of mobile archive: not a museum piece, but a living, contested history of how bodies onstage can register grief, survival, and the stubborn belief that art, even when it feels futile, is still a form of defiance.
K-State University McCain University
Manhattan, KS
Continuous Replay & Story/
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