Bill and Abe (and Walt)

Bill T. Jones doesn’t think small. Commissioned by the Ravinia Festival to create a tribute to Abraham Lincoln for the bicentennial of his birth, he’s crafted a sprawling theatrical spectacle that’s an appropriate companion piece to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, his signature dance-theater piece from 1990.

Sprawling isn’t intended as a criticism. One of the refrains of Fondly Do We Hope…Fervently Do We Pray--“Lincoln is still a story to tell ourselves”—suggests one of the challenges of a piece this: how to parse the man from the image, to negotiate the path between mythology and history.

Set on a huge, multi-part stage, Fondly doesn’t so much distill as embrace. Its spine is a set of biographical portraits, spoken by an African-American man in 19th-century, Lincolnesque garb,, and danced in an area of light set to the right of the main stage. We first hear Lincoln’s life story as it might be memorized by a 5^th grader. And later, the group expands to include portraits of everyday Americans from the past, present and future, including Americans who complain about taxes and speak of the duty of a soldier to fight in a war even if he opposes it.

It's not surprising that Walt Whitman should play a central role here. He's a poetic doppelganger to Lincoln's political vision of democracy. The "catalog" of Americans invokes Whitman, and his poems, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" and "Poem of the Body" are quote directly. The latter, in fact, is used to great dramatic effect, first as a celebration of the body, and again as a chronicle of the abuses bodies suffer under war and torture.

The stage at Ravinia is sprawling, and Bjorn Amelan's setting is classical in spirit and stunningly simple. The center stage is surrounded by a sheer circular curtain, which also functions as a screen for Janet Wong's evocative projections (she also collaborated on the choreography). Shadows, writing, images suggest Lincoln's ghostly presence throughout the piece, and an image of Lincoln's "ghost train" of legend, which is said to follow the route of his funeral train once a year, is equally haunting.

The choreography is a bravura mixture of styles, often suggesting 19th-century forms. And the company delivered, particularly in the various solo turns.

But the dance here is only one ingredient in a work that aspires to do nothing less than plumb our national mood and consciousness through the prism of a figure that embodies its highest ideals. The best thing about Fondly Do We Hope...is that, like Lincoln, Whitman and America itself, it contains multitudes. And in seeing another vision of America, we can perhaps start to make sense of who we are in the 21st century.