THE PROBLEM: The Rich World of Ideas behind "Deep Blue Sea" with Bill T. Jones and Janet Wong

What goes on in the mind of Bill T. Jones while making his work? For this short video montage, Janet Wong – Jones’ artistic assistant and associate artistic director of New York Live Arts – gathered clips that give a sense of how Jones works and where he gets his inspiration. These include behind-the-scenes clips of rehearsals. For Deep Blue Sea, he was inspired by, among other things, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, in which the young black side-character Pip finds himself in the water during a whaling expedition. Jones reads from chapter 93: ‘Out from the centre of the sea, poor Pip turned his crisp, curling, black head to the sun, another lonely castaway...’ In his search for an elusive ‘we’ in these turbulent times, Jones uses the image of Pip to reflect on the dynamic between the individual and group identity. But also Yvonne Rainer’s No Manifesto and Martin Luther King’s I have a dream feature prominently in Bill T. Jones’ rich world of ideas as well.