DANCE:FILM 11: A Good Man

Bill T. Jones, caught in the process of choreographing a commission about Abraham Lincoln, stalks A Good Man like a true modernist artist, torn by doubt, believing in his talent yet finding himself at odds with the very people who support his commission.

Following Jones through his creation is both exciting and painful. Apart from one scene, when the company perform some ritual before going on stage, there’s no sentimentality, no special pleading. Listening to Jones find the hidden racism in the Great Emancipator’s speeches is thrillingly taboo: his arguments with the musicians and dancers reveal the passion that binds them in this difficult relationship.

Jones is an anachronism, a stereotype. The film even addresses this: admitting that he has faith in art, faith in the great man, he surprises himself. He knows that he is arrogant – he moans at one point that he doesn’t want to be a saint – but his physical excellence lends him a charisma that his temper doesn’t deserve. And he is certainly all man, all power. The end of the film sees him going mad for the biggest sound he can get out of the musicians, before being told that he would need to warn an audience about the volume in case someone has a heart-attack.

A Good Man is a reminder that dance can be the most appropriate art for philosophical discussion: what other performance could explore Lincoln without turning it all history detail or windy rhetoric? Where else can the personal and the political mesh so elegantly, as when Jones uses the lives of his dancers to reflect on the USA’s horrible domestic history? And there, at the centre, Jones himself. Battling age, inspiration, expectation. He mocks those who commissioned him for tokenism, then moans that audiences are lazy. He is picture book perfect. [Gareth K Vile]