WINIFRED HAUN & DANCERS
Haun prefers difficult contemporary music, often string music–the Kronos Quartet, Anton Webern, Paul Hindemith–and it’s easy to see why: the attenuation, variety, and innate drama of strings are perfect for her stretched, precise, angular choreography, which often turns unexpected corners (two abstract works from 1990 on this program, Next and Trials, are good examples). The lugubrious comic side of string music is also appropriate to the understated humor of Haun’s 1991 barroom drama Close My Eyes and the 1992 tongue-in-cheek love duet Other Sides (Section II). But in her two most recent works Haun seems interested not in movement for its own sake but in shaping movement to communicate her ideas.
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In one of them, East 90/94 (first shown last November), Haun really starts to mix things up, a process she’d begun with Offer Void, a solo for herself that alternates her usual balletic strength and reserve with a staggering, spastic floppiness we’ve rarely seen in her dancing (Haun performed for several years with Joseph Holmes Chicago Dance Theatre). East 90/94 is a big work for the entire seven-member company–Tammy Cheney, Zineb Chraibi, Cora Donaldson, Heather Girvan, Haun, Malcolm Low, and Lara Tinari–and compared with Haun’s earlier dances it has a lot of partnering, some of it pretty wild. There’s a freedom to East 90/94 missing from some of the earlier works, a willingness to take a tumble, perhaps a literal tumble; to pull dancers off the stage and throw them back on at whim. Even the score–a sound design by Scott Silberstein composed of 20th-century classical music, rock, and recorded sounds (radio news reports, liquid poured into a glass, children’s shouts and laughter)–shows Haun’s wish to stretch out, open things up.
The premiere on this program, Who’s Child?, is not a big work in the way East 90/94 is despite Gene Coleman’s original score, played live. The program tells us the dance was inspired by a true-life story about a girl named Genie, whose parents kept her strapped to a toilet seat in a room by herself from the age of 2 to 13; she was an object of curiosity to linguists because she had no language when she was discovered. Coleman’s music (for percussion, bass clarinet, cello, and invented instruments) is well suited to the subject, its tentative sounds as soft, subtle, and varied as a baby’s squeaks and creaks; but it’s not exactly easy listening.
