Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company
One of the most innovative and powerful forces in modern dance
Tuesday • March 31, 2026 • 7:30 pm
Main Auditorium
Over the past 40 years, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company has shaped the evolution of contemporary dance through the creation and performance of over 140 works. Founded as a multicultural dance company in 1982, the company was born of an 11-year artistic collaboration between Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane. Today, the company is recognized as one of the most innovative and powerful forces in the modern dance world. The company has performed its ever-enlarging repertoire worldwide in over 200 cities in 40 countries on every major continent. In 2011, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company merged with Dance Theater Workshop to form New York Live Arts, of which Bill T. Jones is the artistic director and Janet Wong is the associate artistic director.
The repertory of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company is widely varied in its subject matter, visual imagery and stylistic approach to movement, voice and stagecraft, and includes musically driven works as well as works using a variety of texts. Some of its most celebrated creations are evening-length works, including Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land (1990, Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music); Still/Here (1994, Biennale de la Danse in Lyon, France); We Set Out Early… Visibility Was Poor (1996, Hancher Auditorium, Iowa City, IA); You Walk? (2000, European Capital of Culture 2000, Bologna, Italy); Blind Date (2006, Peak Performances at Montclair State University); Chapel/Chapter (2006, Harlem Stage Gatehouse); Fondly Do We Hope… Fervently Do We Pray (2009, Ravinia Festival, Highland Park, IL); Another Evening: Venice/Arsenale (2010, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy); Story/Time (2012, Peak Performances); A Rite (2013, Carolina Performing Arts at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill); and Deep Blue Sea (2021, Park Avenue Armory).
At the Lied Center, the company will be performing:
“Continuous Replay” is a seminal work of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company that began as an accumulation of 45 shapes created by Arnie Zane in 1977. In 1991, three years after Arnie Zane passed away, Bill T. Jones expanded the work into the current version. “Continuous Replay” is a prime example of a work of rigorous form that also depends on the choices and agency of the performers.
_________________________________
Bill T. Jones’s joyful tour-de-force, “D-Man in the Waters” (1989), is a true classic of modern dance and a two-time Bessie Award-winning work. It is a celebration of life and the resiliency of the human spirit that guides audiences through loss, hope and triumph. Set to Mendelssohn’s “Octet for Strings in E-flat Major, Op. 20,” the work is one of the finest examples of the post-modern aesthetic and was featured in PBS’s landmark film Dancing in the Light–Six Dances by African-American Choreographers. More recently, it was the subject of the 2023 Peabody Award-winning documentary Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man In The Waters.