Bill T. Jones, who celebrates his seventieth birthday this Tuesday, is celebrating a second anniversary this year.
In 1982 he founded the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company with his partner Arnie Zane.
Even for the dance world, which has seen artists from all corners of the earth collaborating for centuries, Jones and Zane's founding was extraordinary.
Not only did the eleven ensemble members (Jones had eleven siblings) differ from each other in nationality or skin color.
In the mid-1980s, that was nothing special.
Everywhere, however, the dancers were largely homogeneous in size and shape.
It had started in the ballet companies and from there it became a law of the dance world - according to the general perception of beauty, a synchronously dancing corps de ballet of 32 women seemed all the more magical the more similar the dancers were in size and shape.
If a dancer was smaller than the pointe dancers, he couldn't be a soloist, and yet he was so talented that it would have been a shame to hide him behind everyone else, then there were joker, jester, or silly parts , dapper Alain in "La Fille Mal Gardée".
Arnie Zane was white and short, and he'd originally been a photographer, not a dancer.
Bill T. Jones is tall, athletic, black and one of the most handsome men in contemporary dance.
Zane didn't start studying dance until he met Jones, and quickly got so good at it that he could make extra money doing go-go dancing as long as the artistic choreography didn't bring in enough money.
Jones had already shown himself to be exceptionally talented in movement in his youth and regarded the stage as his habitat.
One can hardly imagine the two founders of a joint ensemble being more different than these two.
All other members were allowed to be similarly strikingly individual.
Here was a man who made the audience gasp when he first appeared, he was so tall, bearded, athletic, broad-shouldered, and paunchy:
The guest performance of the "Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company" in Berlin at the turn of the eighties to the nineties was an enormous success and incredibly influential, touchingly beautiful and sad.
In 1988, Arnie Zane died of AIDS, and now the company performed without Bill T. Jones' charismatic lover.
Jones himself was distressed.
In Berlin he showed the piece "D-Man in the Waters", one of the most moving and magnificent works of art that dealt with illness and death at the time.
The choreography is incredibly combative and physically a marathon, the dancers dive and slide on their stomachs across the floor, throw themselves and their colleagues from the arms of one into the other, slam into the streets as if the hereafter lay there.
Bill T
"Still/Here" was another unforgettable 1994 track in which Jones processed how illness, death and loss traumatized the lives of that generation - or as one member of the company simply put it, "Half my address book was dead." Like many postmodern American choreographies, the works of Bill T. Jones are no longer seen in this country, and wrongly so.