Serenade/The Proposition is a lively, colorful rumination on the nature of history. The refrain “It could be said that history is…” runs through the piece and asks the question of our connection to history, or lack thereof. Video projections fill an iconic set of movable columns that evoke the architecture of history: the White House, the Parthenon, or the ballroom of an elegant plantation parlor. The spare staging is filled by a cast of fierce dancers in beautifully deconstructed costumes performing flowing movement that assembles into moments of still portrait like postcards from the past. The original score draws from Mozart’s Requiem, Battle Hymn of the Republic, and Dixie to create a contemporary, playful, musical collage for cello, piano, and soprano. The piece premiered at the 2008 American Dance Festival, and is now on tour before being seen in New York at the Joyce Theater, the work’s lead commissioner.
Thursday, November 5
Concert Hall 7:30 PM
$40, $30, $15, Five College/GCC/STCC and Youth 17 and under: $15
I felt the piece was really interesting. The effects were neat, but I had trouble understanding the story and the show didn’t seem to be mainly about Lincoln.
I found it surprisingly dull. Too much posing and speaking, not enough dancing. The live music was nice, though. Disappointing overall.
I am a former dancer and a physical therapist – This was the first dance concert I have attended in abut 10-12 yrs. My main observation is OMG! The Power of the Technique has Evolved! The Power of the dancers bodies! STRONG & STRETCHED! It looked like at least some of the jumps were without “plie” – jumping with straight knees off the ground. The powerful use of arms as well as legs & torso. Excellent! Beautiful. Perfect coordination with each other.
Thank you and Be Good to your Bodies!
The dancing was great. However, I found an apparent disconnect between the story and the dancing. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but the Lincoln aspect seemed contrived. The hype given to the performance earlier by email was overblown. That is, I wasn’t transported to another time and place by the performance.
The dancing was fabulous; the movers are obviously very conscious of each other and worked seamlessly around the column structures. I was a little unsure of how the story was supposed to resonate in the political sense, and definitely didn’t realize it was about Lincoln. I suppose that’s what I get for not doing my research ahead of time! Going to see the show in this way, I assumed that it was about Mr. Jones life and events and places that he had encountered. Maybe, for the uneducated viewer like myself, the piece could develop stronger ties to the subject matter and more connections of the music to the dancing?
Wow! I loved so many parts of the show. As an architect, I enjoyed the way a few columns, with the help of fabulous lighting technique, could create so many types of spaces, enclosure, backdrop, screen, frame, all the while reinforcing the historic context.
The live music was really powerful – and it was very interesting to learn about how the battle hymn was chosen and transformed for the piece, and became so central to it.
If I had gone just to see dance (which was wonderful), perhaps I would have been disappointed. I might have felt that stage design, music, text, should be secondary to the dance. I felt that it was equal to, but that the whole was greater than the sum of the parts.
I appreciated the opportunity to have the cast answer questions after the show. I understand it more now, and would love to see it again with that understanding in the mix.
I enjoyed the show very much. The staging was effective and powerful. The costumes were perfect – loved the addition of red duct tape which gave an illusion of blood with the movement of the dancers. I thought the dance and music and vocals were quite connected and I left pondering the question of history – is it the distance between that man and me? The piece was strong in that it required the viewer to think; ponder. History is so important and not just because it is a time way back when but that it connects with the present and defines who we are and where we can go in the future. Lincoln’s words remain powerful even after all this time. Well done, dancers, well done!
I went with my wife to see “Serenade/The Proposition†with few expectations, but I left feeling elevated and powerfully inspired. The story and dialogue was especially moving, as it gave the dance performances context. What I saw as one of several major themes was a tribute to Richmond, Virginia—a place with an overwhelmingly complex history. The production appeared to deal with deep-rooted personal memories of Richmond by the writer Bill T. Jones, who was giving voice to his layered feeling about a lifetime there—or perhaps to the life of his friend Andrea Smith—or both: Arriving as a child of 4 or 5 in the back seat of his father’s car; high school in the 1960s; the place he first fell in love; a place that as the Capital of the Confederacy during the civil was the center of a war to divided the nation and led to destruction and ruin; a place where a sense of history about Richmond is unique to each person—it can be a history of that woman, or that man (each with a dance piece accompanying); a history of men from the north who came to Richmond to die from cities across the North that were named in a long slow cadence while the city burned and the dancers dramatically told that story in their fluid movements.
The evening progresses while bouncing back and forth between present lives, and past eras—including the fancy lives of pre-Civil War wealthy Virginia elite who could have anything they wanted at the expense of their slaves, to the voice of a combatant born in 1841 reflecting in 1895 on how easy it was at that age to blindly follow and do things that no sane man would ever consider doing with the wisdom and knowledge one has in later life.
Toward the end two powerful themes and dances stood out most strongly for me: the first told of a train going north with the idea of returning home–but this time not randomly scattered around the north, but along the train line from Washington to Philadelphia, Trenton, New York, Albany, Syracuse, and then west to Illinois, ending in Springfield. Was this the train that took Lincoln’s body home after he was assassinated in the nation’s capital April 14, 1865–-or equally, was it the train that took the bodies of northern soldiers back to their cities after they died in battle around Richmond? But trains on those same tracks many years later also took free blacks from Virginia and the south to settle and work in the same northern cities that were named earlier in the performance.
Second was the tribute to Richmond, and the love for that city felt by the young boy who later spent his life there in spite of Richmond’s turbulent past. The love of home and place is a powerful thing, and the way it was presented in this performance by combining dance, music, and dialogue to tell the story, made it was one of the most moving tributes to a place—a ‘lifetime space’—that I can remember.
Another powerful point Jones made was that the history of a place has as many faces as there are people living there. Is there one reductionist history of place that everyone is expected to have, or are places made up from the countless lives of its inhabitants? For the citizens of a place their histories are also unique and meaningful. They can remain attached personally to that place at a later time, even though they know that unjust events also took place there deeper in the past or even in the more recently where the family of that boy had grown up in a segregated south that was still fighting the civil war more than a century after it ended. Yes, places have composite reductionist histories that develop their own mythologies, but places also belong to the people who live their lives in those places and develop their own histories and attachments.
Thus this performance was more than just a tribute to Abraham Lincoln. Yes, the Lincoln Memorial was atop a distant hill while Richmond burned—but Lincoln was never mentioned by name or in the many photographs. While many of Lincoln’s written words were used, so were the words of others—lines from Julia Ward Howe’s Battle Hymn of the Republic that came into play a number of times were equally powerful, as were lines from Frederick Douglas and Oliver Wendell Homes, Jr. So for me as an observer, the tribute to the power of home and place in Richmond was an equally compelling theme.
The genius of a production like this from Bill T. Jones is that by laying out multiple themes, characters and layers of historical events covering nearly 150 years, each viewer was able to run with the ideas and to pull out and play with dancing images and stories the dancers acted out, the words of the narrator(s), songs and music, and in one’s own way, finding what was personally meaningful. For me, when the combatant born in 1841 in the production reflected on how he felt at age 54 in 1895 about the impact of those events on his life, my thoughts flashed to my own great-grandfather who was born in 1840 near Syracuse (one of the Northern cities named), who was wounded and nearly died in Virginia in September 1864 fighting for the North, and who in 1895 was living on the Idaho frontier where his wife died of influenza earlier and where my father was born. For an instant I imaged Major Frederick Wilkie on his Hornet Creek homestead near the headwaters of Hell’s Canyon also reflecting on his civil war experiences and how they altered his life’s journey in unpredictable ways—and how he later died there in 1907 from complications of those old wounds from Virginia. Then I was back into the show.
Clearly, there are multitude ways of understanding and reflecting on this exceptional production—not just one—and viewers can continue reflecting on it for many days after it has ended. There is the desire (and need) to see this masterpiece more than just once or twice, so that each time new layers of understanding can be peeled away one by one into the future.
It’s hard to add anything to what’s been said, particularly Richard Wilkie’s insightful review. My partner and I enjoyed the performance, but probably could’ve used an online tutorial before viewing it! The Q & A afterward was helpful for putting the work into context.
I particularly enjoyed the score and the live music, and the way personal and national history were interwoven. And of course it’s always wonderful to see an accomplished contemporary dance troupe perform a major work.
The performance was an amazing integration of historical imagery, powerful voices, incredible dancing, beautiful costumes–a multimedia performance that made you think and that touched your heart. Yes, it didn’t exactly line up with a strictly Lincoln-esque story line but enough was there as a thread that wove in what might have been Bill T. Jones’s experience or any other person’s experience from the Civil War era on down to today, especially given the current political atmosphere. The message was as complex and moving as the staging.