Communities of gesture: empathy and embodiment in bill t. Jones/arnie zane dance company’s 100 migrations

In the heady post-election days filled with a hope promised by Obama in his acceptance speech, the choreographer Bill T. Jones and his company developed a community-based work, 100 Migrations. 100 Migrations, involving 90 community members and 10 company dancers, models one such horizontal process, addressing the legacy of a cultural icon whose very name invokes notions of community and its particular formation in democracy. Democratic ideals of freedom and equality (those frequently associated with Lincoln) often feel utopian given the daily lived realities of many Americans, and Jones's scepticism of their achievement via Obama's election leads him to focus on performance, not policy, as the base of possible grass-roots activism. Jones and company disrupted habitual patterns of group formation from the beginning of the creative process. Alongside the work's demands on performers, Jones articulates a similar site of growth for the audience as the development of 'a genius public'.