JOSEPH HOLMES CHICAGO DANCE THEATRE
at the Athenaeum Theatre,
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That’s Bill T. Jones’s Soon, which he made for his own company in 1989. This unsentimental romantic duet captures all the ordinariness of living together day by day, then turns a corner and discovers the sudden, hard feelings that are just as much a part of intimacy. The entire dance is washed by the sensual longing in the five songs that make up the score: two old blues tunes sung by Bessie Smith, two songs by Kurt Weill, one by Bertolt Brecht. The choreography continually conveys a sense of loss and recovery, as one or the other dancer lies down, then revives. But Soon ends, abruptly, with a loss–with the dancer we don’t expect to collapse lying on the floor and the other backing away.
Jones’s partner, Arnie Zane, died in 1988; Soon seems to embody Jones’s wish to bring his lover back. This hallucinatory work traps us in a long night of grieving dreams, in a place where identity is fluid, where wishes and fears, longing and contentment, death and sleep follow one another in an endless parade. In the middle section one dancer makes signs with her hands over the other, but the witchcraft doesn’t work–the lover doesn’t come back to life, at least not at this point. Several strong, unusual images of love make the idea of separation more poignant: one dancer jumps into the bowl of the other dancer’s outstretched legs on the floor; the dancers stand in a wide, low second position, knees vibrating, a sensual movement underlined by a splayed hand floating downward; a dancer’s encircling arms display the lover’s face–upside down. Ariane Dolan and McKnight (there were also a male-female cast and a male-male cast) were wonderful, both delicate and strong, everyday and otherworldly.
OK, so maybe it’s true there’s nothing new under the sun. But then the trick is to make us think we’re seeing something new. In Ritmo Latino Arturo Alvarez and Leopoldo Gil don’t even try to pull that off. And Holmes’s Sunday Go to Meetin’, also on this program, is simply straightforward, high-quality imitation Ailey.
Thinking it was a real fall, I stiffened. But it was just Haun trying something new again. Most of her choreography is clean, precise, and odd–distortions of classical line carried off with the utmost authority and control. Like the music of the modern classical composers she loves, Haun’s work is austere and often dissonant. At the same time it’s subtly feminine, delicate and girlish. But in Press On she almost seems to emulate the Twyla Tharp of Sue’s Leg, the clown who introduces fumbles and mistakes and complicated partnerings as if for the hell of it. Abandoning her usual taut lines, Haun has the dancers simply stand in a row, backs to us, arms crossed over their chests–a pose that couldn’t be less presentational. I’m not sure Press On is a completely successful experiment, because it leaves out so much of what’s distinctive and beautiful about Haun’s work. But you have to admire her for not standing still.
