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Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company "Fondly Do We Hope...Fervently Do We Pray"

September 17 and 19 at 8 p.m. at Ravina Festival

By Laura Molzahn:

For two years, choreographer-writer-director Bill T. Jones lived with Abraham Lincoln in his head-plus Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, and the King James Bible. The occasion? The Ravinia Festival commissioned a work celebrating the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth.

Thursday's world premiere of "Fondly Do We Hope ... Fervently Do We Pray" (to be performed again Saturday at Ravinia) honored all those voices-and others. But I wasn't sure I could discern Jones's voice. The very generosity of his approach undermines it: he's thrown in every high-minded kitchen sink in the book and failed to shape and present his own vision. I don't mind postmodern; I loved Jones's "Chapel/Chapter" and, long ago, his "Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land." But there's a tipping point into chaos, and Jones has reached it here.

Too often the visual and aural components compete. A circular scrim, beautiful in itself, opens and closes indiscriminately and serves as a screen for projected images. Several columns appear, disappear, and are moved about for mysterious reasons. A downstage promontory into the audience isolates certain performers from the main stage while video screens at either side of the stage sometimes capture the action, sometimes not. Voiceovers and an onstage narrator alternate or vie with the musician-singers, performing a variety of traditional and commissioned music, onstage or just off the stage. The dancers often seem buried under words: song lyrics, poetry, texts by Jones and others. Few silent, quiet, humorous, or rollicking moments energize the intellectual proceedings.

Two of the nine sections in particular blast us with information. "Biographies" offers bare-bones facts, not only about Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln but about various unnamed American citizens (though one suggests Jones), white and black, born at different times. Though a few quirks and beliefs are mentioned, these recitations come across as insultingly brief and pedantic, especially since the anonymous "characters" fade later. "Debates/The Boil That Bursts" features a shouting match by several speakers-vehement assertions of their rights and opinions, delivered quickly and staged so it's difficult to see who’s speaking. It's nearly impossible to tell what each is saying, much less digest it or compare it to the others' claims.

Jones also makes some counterintuitive emotional choices. The dancer playing Lincoln is short, slight, and blond, and his soft leaps and turns suggest ethereality. Only in one silent solo does his otherworldliness work: when he collapses over a column that's been toppled, he is unmistakably spiritually wounded. Jones's anchor for grief-over the war, the loss of Lincoln-is the famously unstable Mary Todd Lincoln. Her mental problems and laudanum addiction preceded Lincoln's death, but here she's a rock, especially in a late scene when she appears in full mourning. The relationship Jones depicts between a black man and woman, whose duet echoes one between Lincoln and his wife, is far more resonant and emotional than the First Marriage.

A few elements do unify the work, including train sounds that evoke, as Jones explains in a program note, the folk legend of a "spectral train" said to depart Washington every April. Much more pivotal-and moving-is Jones's repetition, three times, of Whitman's seemingly exhaustive inventory of bodily parts in "Poem of the Body." For the first repetition, recited by a childish voice at the top of the show, a tall black woman performs graceful movements that seem to celebrate dance and the body. But the inventory also suggests a slave on the block (human auctions figure elsewhere in Whitman's poem), and the second repetition makes that interpretation all too clear, even including the crack of a whip. But the third repetition is enriching: it adds violent, torturous actions (made familiar to us by Abu Ghraib) to the litany of body parts.

Among the resonant movement motifs is the motion of clasping the hands behind the back, which can convey the bound arms of a slave or the relaxed confidence of a great man strolling. That one action, performed in different ways, reinforces the idea that there's a fine line between forced servitude and the freedom to act and create. It's the single greatest leveling device in a piece that aims to celebrate democracy and the good, if divided, intentions of American citizens.

Speaking of democracy: the program oddly omits certain credits. It cites commissioned composers Jerome Begin, Christopher Lancaster, and George Lewis Jr. and all ten writers. But the musicians aren't credited, and no dancer is named, much less credited with his or her part. No set designer is mentioned (I suspect it was Jones's longtime collaborator, Bjorn G. Amelan). Included, though, is a dense two-page essay from dance scholar Suzanne Carbonneau telling us exactly what to think about the piece.

Reviewed by Laura Molzahn on 09/18/2009 at 10:42 AM