LAST NIGHT ON EARTH

by Bill T. Jones

Book Overview

The internationally acclaimed dancer and choreographer chronicles his life, the evolution of his art, and his professional and personal collaboration with Arnie Zane, who died in 1988. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679439269
• ISBN13: 9780679439264
• Release Date: August 1995
• Publisher: Pantheon
• Length: 286 Pages
• Weight: 1.86 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 1.0" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Compelling

Although journalist Peggy Gillespie was involved with Bill T. Jones in writing his memoir, from hearing him speak (including reading from the book) I know that the voice in it is his and am fairly confident that he decided what incidents and topics to include. Jones has long been an openly gay dancer and choreographer, and more recently an openly HIV+ one slandered as perpetrating "victim art" (by a critic long hostile to him who condemned while refusing to see "Still/here," his attempt to craft a piece about living with terminal diseases). Jones is acutely aware of his body and the fetishization of the body of the big, black stud. He plays with that objectification on-stage and off without forgetting its cost. "My eroticism, my sensuality is often coupled with wild anger and belligerence," he says. "I know that I can be food for fantasy, but at the same time I am a person with a history-and that history is in part the history of exploitation." It is what Jones does with his own (and others') bodies on stage, not just his physical appearance, upon which he wants to focus the interest of many: "The performer who takes the stage must believe that he is fascinating, that he or she deserves being the locus of several hundred or thousand points of attention. . . . The performer wants to be one of many, but even more, he wants to command the attention of many." As I already said, Jones's voice comes through on the page. The book is compelling as a narrative of an interesting life in a difficult time (the time of AIDS to which Jones lost his partner on- and off-stage) and as an account of the wellsprings of Jones's art.

Stellar Memoir, Amazing Honesty

Bill T. Jones, one of the most innovative and controversial choreographers of our time, writes his memoir with honesty, insight, and emotion. I would recommend it to any Bill T. Jones fan, dancer, choreographer, or human.