Bill T. Jones choreographs an impressionistic Lincoln drama

Barbara Hoover / Special to The Detroit News

The assignment was daunting, but if anyone could make it work it was choreographer Bill T. Jones.

The Ravinia Festival in Highland Park, Ill., commissioned him to create a dance-drama to honor the bicentennial of the birth of Abraham Lincoln. The result "Fondly Do We Hope . . . Fervently Do We Pray," titled after a line from Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, premiered last September at Ravinia and is now on tour. It arrives this weekend at Ann Arbor's Power Center.

Jones is not your standard modern-dance choreographer. The drama inherent in subjects such as race, sex and politics has driven his work through his career and the 27-year life of his troupe, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. The name honors the memory of his partner Zane, who died of AIDS in 1988.

Jones' artistry has been widely recognized and honored. He won a MacArthur "genius" grant in 1994, and both Tony and Obie awards in 2007, for his choreography on Broadway's "Spring Awakening." His Broadway directorial debut with the current Afrobeat musical "Fela!" has won high praise from critics.

So it wasn't surprising the planners at Ravinia tapped him for the Lincoln tribute. But that meant he had to think of something different to say about a man about whose life and legacy has been recorded and analyzed in thousands of books, not to mention movies and television shows.

"I knew I had to come up with something that was about us," says Jones by phone from his vacation home near Taos, N.M. "This couldn't be a biopic."

He also had to confront a dichotomy in himself. He says when he was growing up, Lincoln was the only white man he was allowed to love unconditionally. But now past midlife -- he'll be 58 on Feb. 15 -- he's lost his reverence for heroes.

Still, preparing for this assignment, Jones found himself moved to tears in a museum as he touched Lincoln's top hat and the eyeglasses the president wore the night he was assassinated. Jones read a lot, too, but his interest in the man was most reawakened by Doris Kearns Goodwin's "A Team of Rivals."

Jones says the book showed him Lincoln was a flesh-and-blood person, a politician and a man of his time with white-supremacist leanings, but a sense of justice that made him take a stand against slavery.

So, how to turn this into dance?

After lots of experimenting, including the creation of two preliminary dance works, the production now on tour combines modern dance with folk and rock music, videos and narration built from Lincoln's words and the poetry of Walt Whitman.

It touches on portions of Lincoln's biography -- his romance with wife-to-be Mary Todd, his grief over the deaths of two of his four children, his guilt over the war dead, the Lincoln-Douglas debates. But Jones handles much of the material impressionistically.

The slavery issue, for instance, is treated obliquely with a beautiful dance solo to the poetry of Whitman's "I Sing the Body Electric," then becomes more literal when repeated in the voice of a slave auctioneer.

The multimedia approach is Jones' attempt to reach a young audience.

"This is for a generation of people that are much more visual than literary," he says.

And for all generations, Jones helps uncover aspects of Lincoln buried beneath the myth.

Bill Moyers, interviewing Jones in a Christmas Day broadcast of "Bill Moyers' Journal" on PBS, told Jones: "I never thought of Lincoln as a 24-year-old man in the prime of his youth until I watched this.

"There he was, a very young man, swaying like a willow in the wind."

Barbara Hoover is a Metro Detroit freelance writer.