Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company does Lincoln

Fondly Do We Hope…Fervently Do We Pray

A performance by Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company

by University Musical Society Student Advisory Committee member

I went to see Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company's performance at the Power Center on Saturday (Jan 23). Before that, on Friday (Jan 22), I had attended the "Arts of Citizenship" breakfast at the UM Museum of Art, on the topic of "Lincoln in American Culture's Collective Memory", in which several UM faculty members discussed the performance. Robin Wilson, Associate Professor of Dance, who is both a choreographer and a dance historian, said something at the Arts of Citizenship" breakfast that I was struck by. Wilson said that the human body is a container of memory. In our bodies -- our muscles -- we retain memories in a non-verbal, non-visual way -- viscerally and not visually, so to speak. For this reason, dance is very powerful, Prof. Wilson remarked in her talk, when what is being represented has to do with memory. Given that this performance by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company was a "meditation about Lincoln", it had to do, very much, with memory -- national, collective memory in the United States, since Lincoln played such an important role in US history and in the country's changing perception of itself. For this reason, Prof. Wilson felt, dance in particular was a very appropriate medium to celebrate and commemorate Lincoln.

In today's New York Times, newspaper, Eve Ensler remarks in an interview that dance can have a transformative effect on bodily trauma: "When you’ve been raped, the trauma lodges itself in your being". she says. "Dance is a surefire way to release it." Ensler states that, for that reason, she uses dance in the center that she runs for women who have been victims of the civil war in Congo. That, too, made me think of how apposite it is, then, that dance should represent Lincoln and the Civil War, given the national trauma that the Civil War and, subsequently, the assassination of Lincoln, represent for the USA.

The performance consisted of dancing figures (often foregrounded in the two corners of the Power Center stage) and a couple of musicians sitting right in front of the stage and facing the audience. A huge white curtain just behind the front of the stage was used to project images. The performance was nonlinear and non-narrative -- there was no attempt to narrate the life story of Lincoln from beginning to end. Instead, dance, music, and occasional voice-overs were left to speak for themselves.