I saw an incredible work last night—Bill T. Jones’s dance piece about Lincoln, FONDLY DO WE HOPE…FERVENTLY DO WE PRAY. It was presented as part of the Lincoln Center Festival at Rose Hall, one of the 3 new Lincoln center venues at the Time Warner Center three blocks away from the rest of Lincoln Center. It’s hard to categorize this work, because it includes heavy doses of song and spoken narrative in addition to dance (though I’ve been told he frequently does that). Is it a one-act musical? A piece of performance art? Moving sculpture? Obviously this doesn’t matter, but the old aesthetics professor in me loves to categorize things.
It begins (after a sung prelude) with a woman performing a solo dance on a separate oval stage projected out diagonally a few yards from the main stage. As she dances, a voice recites a list of body parts—down to the minutest details (eyebrows, eye lashes, irises…). This recitation occurs at least three times during the piece, including at the very end. I’m not sure what we’re supposed to make of it (or if that even matters), but it suggested three different things to me by the end of the evening. The first, coming as it did at the very beginning of the piece, was a variation on a yoga class, where we’re asked to release each body part in succession until the body is fully relaxed. This seemed appropriate for both the audience and the dancer, since we were transitioning into a different reality. The second, because this was a piece about Lincoln—and because there was a passing reference to his unique beard—was a coroner’s inventory of the body laid out before him. The third—especially given a slave market scene that occurs about halfway through the piece—was of a slave auctioneer enticing buyers with a list of all that they will acquire when they purchase one of his slaves.
The mystery of this one element of the piece is indicative of the entire work, which is filled with movements, devices, moments that lend themselves to multiple interpretations or defy interpretation altogether. Structurally, it begins with short biographies of random individuals, both living and long dead—all presumably directly or indirectly influenced by Lincoln, including Lincoln himself and his wife, Mary Todd. It then moves into some biography of Lincoln and Mary Todd, reenactments of historical events, including debates, the previously mentioned slave market scene, and the Civil War and a long choreographed section depicting “Another War.” (I wasn’t sure if this was meant to be one of the wars occurring long after the Civil War—WWI? WW2? Vietnam?—or one of our current wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, or a future war not yet identified. Perhaps it was all of the above.) And then it ends with one last short biography of a 100-year-old woman looking back at history from the vantage point of 2109. Finally, as this same woman dances, we hear the now-familiar recital of body parts.
I’ve probably made the piece sound much more linear than it actually is. There are long stretches of movement where it’s not at all clear what’s happening and where we—joyfully—just study the movement. And that IS the most joyous part of the work—the incredible movement. Jones’s repertoire of movements is astounding. Very few are standard ballet movements. Many are surprising, sensual, athletic—and always fascinating. I was also struck by the individuality of each dancer. At the opposite extreme of choreography, the dancer’s individual body sometimes disappears into the universality of its movements (think of Swan Lake’s swans or La Bayadere’s shades). Here, however, each dancer appears as a profoundly unique presence. No one else could possibly stand in for any of these dancers—they could replace them with their own individual bodies, but they couldn’t stand in for them.
Having said all this, however, I still feel unprepared to say much about this glorious work. I almost need to go back and see it again, since I’m only beginning to get a sense of it—or only beginning to get to know it. I guess you could say we’ve only just had our first date. But as with all great works, I hope I’ll get to spend a lot more time with it.
www.williamfowkes.com
