PS ’91
Last year’s “Dark Nights” series presented over 130 artists, both emerging and established talent; it was so popular that this year music and dance series have been added. The first dance event offered a mixed bill of local dance companies and choreographers, featuring works from Emergence Dance Theatre, Winifred Haun, Joel Hall, and independent choreographers Christopher Rutt, Brian Frette, and Denise Gula. Despite the unseasonable heat wave, the place was packed.
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The most experimental work was by Emergence; paradoxically, it was also the most limited. Both Metronomic Disparity, choreographed and danced by Sandra Schramel, and Cocoon II, choreographed and danced by John L. Schmitz, make imaginative use of slides and film (conceived by Norman Magden) projected onto the soloists’ bodies and the wall behind them. Of the two pieces, Schmitz’s is the more static, because his choreographic vision is obscured by the overwhelming visual force of the constant projections. Wearing a white mask, dressed in white and carrying two large winglike white fans, Schmitz moves in the same predictable variations, flapping the butterfly wings to catch various projected images and hues. Some of these projections, however, produce stunningly beautiful effects, almost surreal glimpses into another world. A tiny projection of the white-clad dancer appears behind and underneath him on the wall, for instance, then becomes enlarged when it’s occasionally captured on the dancer’s moving wings, or his leg, or his torso.
Winifred Haun (a member of the Joseph Holmes Chicago Dance Theatre who was recently nominated for a Ruth Page award for her dancing) showed three works. In The Wall, she tackles the big theme of war. A woman gives birth to a son and raises him to be a man–only to lose him to the military, literally represented here by a line of dancers in black unitards and army camouflage hats. Though the piece is definitely ambitious, the choreography is too heavy-handed and obvious and the dancers in their shiny unitards are too sleek and glamorous to convey the real horrors of combat. Haun’s Next begins with a lineup of seven dancers in black unitards; bright purple or blue sashes around their waists add an imaginative touch (costuming by Dolores Haun). Unfortunately the studio space was just too small for them to go through their choreographic paces, cramping the dance’s lyrically angular style.
