Dance for thought

Just when you thought the world had run out of ways to confound you, you find shamed footie pundit Ron Atkinson and America's black dance pioneer Bill T Jones popping up in the same sentence. So let's get the N-word out of the way right at the start.

We know how Atkinson's loose mouth got him the boot. But Jones brings his own spin on the debate with a new work, part of his company's 20th-anniversary tour, which was inspired by a Flannery O'Connor short story with the controversial title The Artificial Nigger. It's a fable of racial awareness around which Jones weaves his own narrative.

Titling his own piece Reading, Mercy And The Artificial Nigger, he expects eyebrows to be raised. 'You have to get past the associations of the word,' says Jones. 'That's the challenge - you have to recalibrate what the word means. There's a way in which you understand a word and there's a way in which you understand a movement - and there's a way in which you can read a dance.'

It's a statement that's consistent with the trail Jones has blazed since he and partner Arnie Zane started out: to combine joyous, life-affirming dance with material that provides food for thought.

'Why a retrospective?' he muses. 'Well, the style has evolved over the years. So I guess it gives people a chance to understand how you came to be the person you are now. There's a lot of aesthetic and psychological territory to cover.'

The psychological part is a reference to Zane, whose name the company still bears some 15 years after his death. The legacy of Jones's creative and personal partner is key to the company and is honoured in full in the current touring repertoire, which includes revivals of Blauvelt Mountain, the duet with which the daring duo made their name, and Zane's signature work, The Gift.

'My job over the 15 years since Arnie has been gone is to become two people,' says Jones. 'I've tried to think more like the visual artist he was, while not losing what I already have, which is the sense of the performance.

'What we were striving for in our definition of New Dance was a definition of style with no boundaries. But I now believe that style has definite boundaries. It is a commitment to a way of doing things.'

Commitment is the key to Jones's remarkable contribution to dance. In an era when modern dance, particularly in America, was shying away from the real world in favour of abstract visual aesthetics, his highly physical work pushed social issues and political concerns to the fore. His emotional tour de force, Still/Here, made the stigma of guilt surrounding HIV and Aids central to the artistic agenda.

Jones acknowledges the piece was crucial in enabling him to push himself in new directions. 'What I took from Still/Here was that there was something empowering about not cowering under grief. If you share the experience you can move on.' Though not turning his back on the issues - most notably racism and human rights - that have driven his work, Jones has now shifted the balance to a more individual perspective.