Winifred Haun, whose daughter Athena is now six months old, calls one of her new pieces “the baby dance.” But that’s not its official name (it didn’t have one when I saw a rehearsal), and characteristically she describes it as not about babies at all: it’s an abstract suite based on four very roughly connected movement ideas. Only one of the sections, a solo, looks like a baby’s movement, but here the baby is an elegant, long-limbed dancer whose pigeon toes and slow progress on her cheek across the floor, butt hiked in the air, are wonderfully precise. The third section looks like narrative, Haun tells me, but isn’t: four dancers alternately lounge on chairs and adopt angled, fantastic poses on and around them. That’s Haun: a little perverse, never quite what you imagine. The other new piece, One Up, is set to a sound design by Scott Silberstein that alternates the sound of a Ping-Pong ball on a table with music by Blues Traveller, and the dancing too is sometimes as spare as a pencil sketch, sometimes as round and full and inevitable as old-time rock ‘n’ roll. Haun’s company also reprises her Leadfoot Suite, premiered a year and a half ago, plus Neither, performed by a dancer and by musician Gene Coleman, and Close My Eyes. Taking a new tack, Haun will also improvise a piece to Coleman’s bass clarinet. There will be a free preview performance Thursday, October 3, at 12:15 in the auditorium of the Harold Washington Library, 400 S. State. Regular performances are Friday and Saturday, October 4 and 5, at 7:30 in the same place; $15 (benefit on Saturday is $35, with events preceding and following the performance). Call 784-6735 for tickets and information.
–Laura Molzahn
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo by Michael Mauney.