WINIFRED HAUN & DANCERS
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What makes Haun’s dances even more interesting is that, though some things may be clear as a running brook, others are teasingly murky. In It’s Both the relationship between the dancer and the musician is obvious. Haun begins and ends in a position of power over Coleman–kneeling on his back like a succubus and, at the end, putting her chin in her hands with a Cheshire grin of triumph. But through the rest of the piece, when he’s playing, he’s oblivious to her, concentrating on the blats and squeaks of his clarinet. And that makes her mad. He’s imperturbable, gentle, and she’s wildly antagonistic, banging her elbows, then her palms, down on a metal folding chair; slamming down the chair itself; sticking the tulle pouf on her rump in his face; aggressively turning her back on him; sitting with her hands over her head and pushing her feet into the floor like someone irritably digging her toes into the sand.
It’s Both might be a relationship dance if Coleman weren’t so pointedly a musician and Haun a dancer, which makes us think allegorically. Is Haun saying that dance is dependent on music? Or does her kneeling on him before and after he plays indicate that music doesn’t exist unless a dancer lets it loose? Does a choreographer feel trapped by her music, hostile to its dictates? Or is she in fact largely independent of its rhythms, as Haun is in this piece? Then again, maybe a dance so whimsical isn’t meant to support such ponderous ruminations.
It’s in the middle section of At Her Music (danced not to spoken text but to Scott Silberstein’s percussive sound design) that Haun really dramatizes the protagonist’s sense of loss. As if to illustrate an earlier expression in the text–“murdered time”–Haun has the chorus repeat motions with metronomic regularity, something like a ticking clock, while Cheney moves freely; yet the way Cheney moves into and out of sync with the chorus’s movements hints that she’s marking time too. Her series of quick jumps followed by several quick looks side to side are repeated later by the chorus, like paranoid thoughts the protagonist can’t escape.
