Transcript: What Does He Have to Say to Us Today?

Bill: So I have to blow it out for Abraham Lincoln, right?

Bob [vo]: The Ravinia Festival approached the company to make a piece about Abraham Lincoln in honor of his bicentennial.

Bill: Ya-ah-ah-ah-ah! Right?

Bill: Get, get the leg in front of you! This. This. This. In front. I don’t want to see that.

Welz [vo]: Approaching Bill T. felt daring, foolhardy, for a lot of reasons.

Welz: I had grown up with San Francisco Ballet doing the Nutcracker, and in dance, is there anything further from the Nutcracker than Bill T.? Probably not. Um, I’d love to see a Bill T. Nutcracker.

Bill: Ya-ah-ah-ah Ya-ah-ah-ah Ah-ah. Revelé. Don’t jump.

Bob [vo]: I think it’s the most ambitious work in the twenty-five year history of the company.

Bill: And. Ya-ah-ah-ah ya-ah-ah-ah ah…

Bob [vo]: It puts a certain level of pressure on the artist.

Bill: From the beginning. And…ya-bah-dee-ya-da-bah-ah-ah-bah…

Bill [vo]: How can I talk about such a strong, ambiguous figure? What does he have to say to us today?

Obama: There was a man from this state who first carried the Republican Party to the white house…as Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours: ‘We are not enemies, but friends’.

Bill [vo]: What does it mean, this 200th anniversary?

Bill: And is this man a story that we tell children? Or is he more complicated than that? I know there have been voices in the African-American community that say he was not the great emancipator; he was an ultimate politician.

Bill: But I’ve always been very much in the camp that this was a Good Man.

Now, a Good Man, question mark? Or a Good Man, exclamation!

Bill [vo]: The way the man speaks. Directly from his heart. The text you could almost weep with its beauty.

Bill [vo]: Can he really be so unsullied?

Bill: What our stage picture wants to say, what our dance wants to say at this point is, here we have a picture of a society that is…arguing about principles. It looks like this in dance. And I just want it, just the slightest – just a little nudge, ‘what is it they’re talking about? Oh, it’s about citizenship, it’s about uh, fate, of blacks, it is about the institution of slavery, it is about the union.

Janet [vo]: We are trying to find openings in his...

Janet: ...speeches that relate to us. I think we want to locate Lincoln in the present.

Bill [vo] It is an incredibly literary topic, and this rich record of text, makes it…

Bill: I'm, I’m feeling crushed by it at the moment

Janet --and I am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.

Bill: That’s all Douglass you said, right?

Janet: No this is all Lincoln.

Bill: All Lincoln, yeah. One more time?

Janet: Okay. “I am not, nor have I ever been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races. Whether this feeling accords with justice and sound judgment, it is not the sole question, if indeed it is any part of it. We cannot then make them equals.”

Bill: Mmmm. Mmmm. Mmmm. Okay. Yeah. Um, that’s Lincoln?

Janet: Yeah.

Bill: Well what do you have from Frederick Douglass?

Janet: Frederick Douglass.

Janet: [reading] The mean and cowardly oppressor is meditating plans to expel the colored man entirely from the country. Shame upon such a proposition! We live here. Have lived here. Have a right to live here. And mean to live here.

[to Bill] That line has a nice cadence.

Bill: Mmm hmmm. See, the arguments have got to be a tweak of the dial away from a discourse we might be having now.

Janet: Mmm hmm.

Bill: About them. You know, of course the one that comes to mind is gay marriage, right?

Janet [vo]: Yeah.

Bill [vo]: Or immigration.

Speaker 5: I don’t care if he was born here or came over the border! It is best to keep them separate from us!

Shayla: Speaker six!

LaMichael: Here we are and here we shall remain!

Speakers: It’s clear, we’re here, get used to it!

Speaker: I’d rather die first!

Speakers: It’s clear we’re here, get used to it!

Speaker: I’d rather die first!

Speakers: It’s clear we’re here, get used to it!

Speaker: We’d rather die first!