Bob Eisen Dance, Gus Giordano Jazz Dance Chicago, and Winifred Haun & Dancers
I ran into Bob Eisen on opening night of Dance Chicago ’95 a few weeks ago, when a lot of the participating artistic directors were in the audience. He was wearing a festive red vest and his customary bemused look, and when I asked if he was looking forward to being on the Athenaeum’s big proscenium stage (he usually performs at Link’s Hall, where he’s the manager), he responded with surprising enthusiasm for someone usually studiously unimpressed.
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But then he’s always assaulting theatrical convention one way or another, often playing around with time as well as space. Circuits arguably begins during intermission: I saw Eisen and his three dancers (in clownish outfits only slightly more unusual than what audience members were wearing) marching up the stairs from the lobby to the balcony. Eisen doesn’t aim for the usual theatrical experience: 1 Thru 6 x 2 With Chance Variations is more traditional than Circuits, but if it succeeds the repetition of phrases should induce in the audience a trancelike state spiked by seemingly random changes in the score of found sounds (an engine starting up, cloth ripping, crickets, static, a pig squealing). Eisen’s choreographic shapes, at once soft and angular, seem designed to be cut up and juxtaposed–the order of the sections is partly random–and still please the eye. Aiming for a meditative state, he allows the piece to go on too long, but basically he accomplishes what he wants.
Winifred Haun’s dances lie somewhere between Eisen’s and those performed by the Giordano company, a vast middle ground. We would never mistake her dances for real life. But neither are they intended to wow us, even though to perform them well requires considerable virtuosity. Smack-dab in the Western concert tradition of ballet and modern dance, Haun aims for meaning and feeling where Eisen and the Giordano troupe come by them almost by accident, if at all. But in her premiere, Land of the Free, her reach exceeds her grasp. Part of the problem is a long voice-over text so loud and resounding as to be unintelligible. The fragments I could pick up suggested that a black woman was speaking about slavery, and certain choreographic images reinforce that idea: one woman continually burdens another, riding her piggyback or hanging on to her ankles while she walks. Later one woman strikes and perhaps kills another. But more interesting than the message about slavery and its legacy is the psychological message revealed in the choreography: that people are either completely isolated from one another or completely dependent. That was troubling.
Classical Indian dance, on the other hand, is deeply connected to Hinduism. The conventions of bharatanatyam are determined by scripture, and its function is to communicate scripture and keep it alive. And because religion permeates
