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Now he’s working on a sextet for the Seldoms, Whiff of Anarchy, that looks at group energy in a different way. The inspiration for the piece, which previews at the Loyola University Museum of Art 10/28 and 11/8, was “this cheesy show on Bravo about the best riots and disturbances of 2007: football games with riot behavior and other things around the world,” he says. “I got fascinated by the body formations. The crowd seemed like an organism. I started to look closer, and there was a logic to this organism even in different settings.”
Third Swan From the End was the product of a Chicago Dancemakers Forum grant Jones received in 2006, the same year he got another big break: a tenure-track job at the Dance Center of Columbia College. Not bad for a guy who’d just moved to Chicago from New York in late 2005. But if Jones seems like a child of fortune, at 39 he’s no kid. He’s paid his dues, having danced with Urban Bush Women, Bebe Miller, Ralph Lemon, Ronald K. Brown, and butoh master Min Tanaka.
Jones will have another piece to show besides Whiff this fall. In September he performs a duet, Traitor, at the Other Dance Festival, with his collaborator, Dance Center professor Lisa Gonzales.
