Bill T. Jones, two quartets grace stage

Bill T. Jones, the dancer and choreographer, was once frightened of music by Beethoven. Then he met the Orion String Quartet, which, it would stand to reason, might have been somewhat shy about dance. Together, movement met music and the refreshing outcome is a joint creative spectacle between the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, where the Orion String Quartet is in residence.

The dance company and quartet, as well as members of Chamber Music Society Two, a second Lincoln Center quartet, performed Tuesday at the Maine Center for the Arts in Orono. It was a panoply of sound and motion, a competition of genres, and a race that left each artist with a first-place prize.

That initial collaboration between Jones and Orion spawned three new music-dance works, all of which have received national media attention during a nine-stop tour across the country. Two of the new works – “Black Suzanne” and “Verbum” – were performed at the Orono venue, which also included Jones’ award-winning 1989 choreography “D-Man in the Waters” and a musical interlude in which Orion played Ravel’s Quartet in F while solo dancer Germaul Yusef Barnes gave the music a more corporeal expression and additional grace.

For music lovers, the sharpness and lyricism of the Orion players were the draw of this program. After all, musicians Daniel Phillips (violin), Todd Phillips (violin), Steve Tenenbom (viola) and Timothy Eddy (cello) have earned a reputation for reliably exquisite sound, with particular authority when interpreting Beethoven. To hear them relay one of Beethoven’s late quartets (Opus 135) is to witness poetry rise off the pages of a score.

To see Jones’ choreographic response to that same music was at least as breathtaking. “Verbum” stayed with the romance of Beethoven’s era but filtered the bodies of dancers through Jones’ own American sensibility. The quirky movements – part traditional dance, part street funk, part post-modern thumbing of the nose – showed what might have happened to ballet had it been invented by Jones in the last 20 years. “Verbum,” the Latin for word or expression, alternated between a bemused physicality and deep emotion, yet it never lingered on the superficial or solipsistic.

For anyone engaged in the proliferation of a rich cultural life, the show was equally about fine musicianship and one of America’s most important and synergistic choreographers. Jones is a melting-pot choreographer, as committed to chaos as to order, to multiculturalism as to individualism, to dissent as to love.

From the running-man motif acted out on red gym mats and padded body suits in “Black Suzanne,” performed to segments from Shostakovich’s String Octet (Opus 11), to the high-powered “D-Man,” whose military theme has taken on a new relevance in our current political climate, Bill T. Jones proved himself a troublemaker, a shape shifter, a commentator and one of the great minds of American dance. It is not that live music and movement have not been paired closely in the past. It is, simply, that Jones cleaved intimately to the Orion String Quartet and other Lincoln Center musicians to work his imaginatively integrated and intelligent artistry.