Multiple Tony award-winning director, dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones will perform the Southern California premiere of Story/Time at 8:00PM on Saturday, October 10 at the Richard and Karen Carpenter Performing Arts Center at Cal State University, Long Beach, the Carpenter Center announced Monday.
Story/Time is a meditation on experimental composer John Cage’s Indeterminacy, according to Jones, a 1958 work in which Cage reads 90 stories, each one lasting the length of a minute.
According to the Carpenter Center, Jones wrote, “Engaging with this seminal work allowed me to examine and interrogate a system of thought and practice grounded in ideas held by many—myself included—striving to understand how Eastern thought, liberation philosophy and art could be used to redefine reality for both the maker and his or her audience.”
Story/Time will feature nine dancers recontextualizing steps from his extensive career as he reads minute-long stories, many from his own life. Spontaneity is the show’s leading role as electronic music from intermedia artist Ted Coffey, lighting cues, dancing and stories are combined to create truly original performances.
Stories read have included descriptions of Jones’ dying lover Arnie Zane, a conversation between his mother and Anjelica Huston, use of cocaine by railway workers that spread through rural black communities and a woman who badly burns herself after a night of drinking, according to the announcement.
Jones’ major honors include a MacArthur Genius Award, the, 2014 National Medal of Arts, the Kennedy Center Honors and two Tony awards, while this performance marks the star’s return to the Carpenter Center following his 2012 residency during the theatre’s B-Word Project: Banned, Blacklisted and Boycotted—Censorship and the Response to it. According to the release, at that time, CSULB dance students performed Jones’ piece, Reading, Mercy and the Artificial Nigger, a work inspired by a Flannery O’Connor short story and was the first time the work had been performed by dancers outside of Jones’ own dance company.
This if the first of three performances in the Carpenter Center’s 2015-16 Dance Series subscription. For tickets and more information, click here or call the ticket office at (562) 985-7000. Single tickets begin for Story/Time begin at $40 and subscriptions to all three Dance Series events are $99.
Image courtesy of the Carpenter Center.
The Richard and Karen Carpenter Performing Arts Center is located at 6200 Atherton Street.
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