Last Night on Earth
African American choreographer and dancer Jones challenges audiences' expectations about race, sex and politics in provocative avant-garde compositions dealing with racism, homophobia, AIDS, interracial romance?subjects he knows firsthand. In 1988, Jones's longtime lover and collaborator, Arnie Zane, who was white and Jewish, died of AIDS. Jones, diagnosed as HIV-positive in 1985, remains asymptomatic but is driven by a sense of urgency. Writing with freelancer Gillespie, he describes the "survival workshops" he has conducted and videotaped around the country for people coping with life-threatening illnesses; this provided the raw material for his multimedia dance Still/Here. The son of migrant field-workers who left rural Florida in 1955 to settle in a nearly all-white upstate New York town when he was three, Jones writes affectingly of his boyhood, his bohemian years in Amsterdam and San Francisco, his struggle for artistic identity and his creative work in New York City as director of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. This is an eloquent and moving autobiography. Photos.Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.