Ravinia adds stage work to Lincoln celebration
Having celebrated its own centennial with great success three years ago, the Ravinia Festival has announced a major commission as its contribution to the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial in 2009.
Award-winning choreographer Bill T. Jones, who most recently won a Tony Award for his choreography in "Spring Awakening" on Broadway, will create a new full-evening stage work, tentatively titled "A Good Man."
Jones and Ravinia Festival president and CEO Welz Kauffman made the announcement last week at a news conference at the Chicago History Museum in the room displaying the Lincoln death bed.
Ravinia's presentation of the work will be performed by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, based in New York.
"The image of Abraham Lincoln's long, broken body stretched across what was to become his death bed will be at the heart of the work," Jones said. "I wonder about the paradise our country could have been if Lincoln had lived to complete the reconstruction of America, but which we are only left to imagine.
"I would like to share that vision with audiences and then remove it in order to expose that great distance between what is and what could have been."
Jones arrived in Chicago last week following a visit to Springfield's historic Lincoln sites, places where the future 16th president launched his national political career in the 1850s. Jones stopped at the old State Capitol, Lincoln's home, his tomb in Oak Ridge Cemetery and the Lincoln Library and Museum.
Kauffman, a member of the Illinois Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, sees the celebration as an opportunity for guests and artists from throughout the state to visit Ravinia, which for years has worked toward diversifying audiences and programming through commissions and premieres.
Examples include works by such composers as John Adams, Osvaldo Golijov, Mark Morris and Philip Glass -- not to mention the American premiere of the first opera from South Africa, "Princess Magogo."
"Bicentennial celebrations by their very definition are about a single moment in time, but any artistic celebration of the great Abraham Lincoln requires something truly timeless. That's why we sought out Bill T. Jones," Kauffman said.
Lincoln was assassinated less than 40 years before Ravinia, North America's oldest summer music festival, was founded in 1904 by a railroad company as an amusement park.
Details on the project, which is under development, will be released as the work progresses, but it will be the centerpiece of Ravinia's 2009 celebration of Lincoln's life and legacy.
"I want to create a dance theater work that investigates a handful of key moments from his remarkable life and subjects them to a process whereby song and memory deliver us beyond the boundaries of space and time," Jones said.
After working together for more than a decade as a critically lauded dance team, Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane (1948-1988) formed their own company in 1982. Since then, the 10-member company has performed in more than 200 cities around the world and is recognized for its collaborative work with artists ranging from painter Keith Haring to the Orion String Quartet.
Ravinia's 2009 celebration will reflect many aspects of Lincoln's life and times with a wide range of programs given under the banner "Mystic Chords of Memory," a quote from Lincoln's first inaugural address.
Ravinia received a $70,000 grant from the Illinois Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, which will help the festival commission up to 10 chamber music compositions, each setting or framed by Lincoln's words.