WINIFRED HAUN & DANCERS AND PAULA FRASZ
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Frasz’s comic side is on display in The Mood Swing, a romantic trio set to cowboy music. Like her earlier works Eggs and Shoulder Pads, this dance pits two women against each other as they strive for a man’s attention. In The Mood Swing the man (Randall Newsom) seems to prefer the slender woman (Judith Chitwood), but the other woman (Frasz) keeps trying; essentially the man dances with whoever throws herself at him hardest. The women’s competition centers on an over-the-shoulder lift: Newsom successfully lifts Frasz and sets her down, but Chitwood uses the lift to perch on his shoulder, and he parades her around. Interspersed are bits of social dance (country-and-western swing, a little tap and stamping, some Broadway hoofing) and bits of music (cowboy yodeling and Frasz singing the verses of the bluegrass song “Cripple Creek” that mention women throwing themselves at men). Happily, Frasz wins the contest finally.
A comic piece like The Mood Swing fatalistically assumes that men will take the easy way out in romance. The fatalism in Frasz’s Sea Songs is much darker. In its first section, “Undertow,” a man (Mark Foster) at the end of a long rope drowns as a song extolling the virtues of the sailing life is sung, accompanied by the sound of the sea. The remaining two sections show the women left behind in the sailing village, waiting for their husbands to return. In “Three Fishers” three women (Margi Cole, Donna Hinsberger, and Regina Wilken) swirl, throw themselves off their centers, and fall, then catch themselves a moment later; the lyrics of the song (by Stan Rogers) go, “Men must work and women must weep.” In “Widows Walk” the women pace around a square of light at the center of the floor; it seems to become an open grave, and each woman in turn throws herself in and is pulled out by the other women. The dancing in all sections was excellent. If The Mood Swing is about how inevitably foolish men are, Sea Songs is about the certainty of women’s grief.
Haun’s dance, based on Russ Rymer’s New Yorker article, has a lot of narrative ground to cover, and it doesn’t entirely succeed. Genie’s abusive father and passive mother (Malcolm Low and Tammy Cheney) appear, as do several linguists (Low, Cheney, and Marquita Levy), but the best moments are Genie’s. Her bizarre movement is remarkable both for its sensuous exploration of new possibilities and for its inward-turning self-stimulation. Lara Tinari captures Genie’s movement perfectly; when Tinari dances, she seems completely absorbed in what she’s doing–and her absorption is well suited to Genie’s character. Despite its problems, the dance is both affecting and enraging.
