“Four score and seven years ago,” Abraham Lincoln famously reminded an audience faced with a vast number of soldiers to bury, “our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Bill T. Jones’s Serenade/The Proposition is almost as dedicated to the notion that all texts are created equal. The otherwise glorious piece – one of his two works touring the US that take up Lincoln’s legacy – nearly sinks under this article of postmodern faith.

Beautiful paradox: Erick Montes

The choreographer has set himself an arduous task: how to turn an influence into theatre. He opts for a maximalist, egalitarian approach. Along with images and a mishmash of music, a collage of recited and sung texts, live and on tape, juxtaposes history and the present, the battlefield and the podium, while 10 dancers perform strictly non-illustrative moves.

But the texts won’t co-operate. The identity issues that the dancers air at a company blab session sound fatuous beside a blazing Lincoln and Oliver Wendell Holmes. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” knocks flat Jones’s own homilies on history.

Meanwhile, though, there is the dancing. Not so special solo, in ensemble the handsome dancers give expression to the twin principles Lincoln laboured under: a slave’s freedom depends on his being admitted to humanity and to a republic that, Lincoln explained, throws off “the arguments that kings have made: you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it”.

Jones combines a loose, ribbony style with inventive, all-over partnering, and the result is tumultuous huddles and clouds of movement. Anjia Jalac’s inspired riffs on 1860s fashion, with puff of underskirt and pantaloon, help. The dancers periodically freeze in a tableau of eclectic union that runs down the centre like a marching column.

Tumbled together under Robert Wierzel’s shafts and pools of light, the dancers each reveal their “unspeakable somewhat”, as Holmes calls the Civil War soldier’s spirit. With this beautiful paradox, Jones finally succeeds in serenading Lincoln and the future he left us.

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