Last night on earth

Born in Bunnell, Florida, in 1952, the tenth of twelve children in a migrant worker's family, Bill T. Jones spent his early years traveling up and down the East Coast with his parents as they followed the crop seasons. In 1959 they settled in upstate New York, and it was there - singing rounds in dusty tractor yards and watching grown-ups from the shadows of the juke joint - that Jones began his life in dance. Jones has continued to choreograph and dance, and in Last Night on Earth he documents the creation of several of his pieces, including Absence, Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land, Last Night on Earth, and Still/Here. Jones illuminates the process through which his work has become a way of expressing profound emotion; of exploring ideas around memory, sexuality, race, and mortality; of imposing order and beauty on chaos and despair. And in so doing, he shows dance to be not only a sequence of beautiful movements on a stage, but also an instrument of survival.