Bill T. Jones Will Be Onstage in His New Work, "Story/Time" It's tempting to say that Bill. T. Jones has followed the classic trajectory from artistic outsider to consummate insider. Mr. Jones, a choreographer, writer and theater director whose reputation was built on provocative work that marries high-art aesthetics with social concerns, has journeyed from the stages of downtown dance to two Tony awards for choreography and a Kennedy Center Honor. But Mr. Jones, in a recent interview, insisted that he is still a "stranger in a strange land," making an "audacious" shuttle between avant-garde and commercial audiences. Bill T. Jones returns to performing with his new work, "Story/Time." Bill T. Jones, with Jennifer Nugent, in rehearsal for "Story/Time," set to premiere Saturday at Montclair State University. "Story/Time," his newest work, set to premiere Saturday at the Peak Performances series at Montclair State University, represents his official return to performing after a few years away as well as a return to his experimental mode. He said "Story/Time," a co-commission of Peak Performances and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis was inspired by the composer John Cage's "Indeterminacy," first performed in 1958, a series of one-minute spoken-word stories that was different each time it was performed and was eventually recorded as an album. Mr. Jones's version puts him at a desk onstage, reading his own series of mostly autobiographical stories, as his troupe's nine members surround him. Each performance is 70 minutes long and includes 50 to 70 stories, as well as silences. What ties Mr. Jones's new version to Mr. Cage's original is the use of chance; the stories and order in which they are read are also selected randomly for each performance. The choreography, the music and Ted Coffey's eclectic, computer-assisted score are not always synchronized. The conceit, first posited by Mr. Cage (and often employed by Mr. Cage's longtime collaborator Merce Cunningham), is that the dissonance allows the audience to determine the relationships onstage. The one-minute time limit imposes a formal structure. "You might say everything up until this point in my life has been about this piece," said Mr. Jones, who in late 2010 merged the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company with Dance Theater Workshop to start New York Live Arts, a new artist-led producing and presenting group. "Having had a lot of attention in the last few years for any variety of things, I thought, "Now, you can go back to the tough business of making something that maybe is not for everybody, but it might be part of the great discourse around art, redefining what it is and so on." " In one story in the new work, for instance, a woman sits alone on a couch "distraught because she can't pay her mortgage." The landlord ravishes the woman's daughter, and the dancers pantomime the action. But at times the dancing is independent of the narrative, with moves that are by turns sensual and aggressive. The clock ticks down the seconds on a wide range of stories: Mr. Jones burying his mother, the death of his companion Arnie Zane, and a woman who badly burns herself after a night of drinking. "Story/Time" continues the discourse about art that started back when Mr. Jones and Mr. Zane began their company in 1982 and asked themselves who they were and what was worth doing, said Mr. Jones, who chatted between rehearsals in a Midtown theater. He said he has long admired Mr. Cage and liked his insistence in "Indeterminacy" that audiences bring their own meaning to the work and discover the unity between sounds and stories. "He thought secondly about the audience perception," said Mr. Jones, dancer thin, in big dark-framed glasses, his once-dark hair now snowy. "This was the freedom that was promised by being a truly independent and adventurous artist," He turns 60 on Feb. 15 and still vibrates with nervous energy. "There are not that many people like me who have been able to go from the world of New York Live Arts to Broadway, back and forth," he said. It's an audacious proposition and it's not proven if it will work yet. I'll be damned, why not try?