Winifred Haun & Dancers
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Unfortunately Haun’s Minutes, which she premiered last fall at the Athenaeum, suffers in such close quarters. The piece is dominated by a huge black table: Haun’s subject is business meetings, and by extension the power struggles and confrontations of corporate life. Seen from a distance the table must dwarf the seven dancers, making them seem ineffectual, toylike; but from a couple dozen feet away the table seems more playground equipment than oversize furniture. And an audience member can easily be distracted by its creaking, worried it’s not sturdy enough to support the dancers.
Still, Haun’s works can cross over–though they convey different effects in different places. Her other new piece is a companion work to It’s Both (1993): Neither is also a solo she performs with bass clarinetist Gene Coleman playing onstage. I’ve seen It’s Both only in proscenium theaters, where it comes off well–odd but clean and humorous–and I bet it would work in a small place the same sweaty, intimate way Neither did at Link’s. Conversely, transferring Neither to a larger, more traditional venue might make it communicate a sense of humor the way It’s Both does: seen from a distance, Haun’s deadpan Saint Vitus’s dance and giant pas de cheval might seem less odd and tortured, more comical. Yet Other Sides (a 1992 duet for a man and woman who squabble themselves into exhaustion, then return to watching television) seemed funnier at Link’s than it has in larger spaces, perhaps because we could see the dancers’ faces.
Company member Amy Crandall also messes around with the music in her Buffalo Grove, a clean, simple piece set to Bach that sometimes recalls Paul Taylor’s Esplanade. Yet Crandall’s piece is occasionally restrained in a way that Esplanade never is: she almost seems to be working against the flowing string music by making static pictures. Crandall avoids the pitfalls of many young choreographers–creating pieces that are too busy and unstructured or that tackle “big” issues–but one wonders whether she intended to work so strongly against the music, and if so why.
