Winifred Haun & Dancers
RECOMMENDED
Like so many performances, the idea came out of conversation, this time between a mentor and a young artist. Winifred Haun, who has been making dances for her eponymous company for twenty years, was talking with her young assistant artistic director Solomon Bowser about ideas coming up in and outside his college classrooms. “We talked about Treyvon Martin and I remember him asking me, ‘Wini, do you believe in white privilege?'” Haun says. “I replied, ‘Well, yes. It’s not so much about belief. It’s a fact.’ About two years ago he wanted to start making work about it.” Bowser first worked in open rehearsals with Winifred Haun & Dancers, then began developing, in collaboration with Haun, a piece for primetime. The result is “I am (not) this body,” which premieres at the Studebaker Theater in the Fine Arts building Saturday, November 3, alongside other short works. The dance examines how certain bodies are societally ascribed less value, or treated as invisible altogether.
“Being who we are, Solomon tackled issues related to black bodies and I tackled issues related to women’s bodies,” Haun tells me. “I worked with female dancers and the music I chose was written by women. We created four times the material than what will wind up in the piece, so a lot of the process was extracting things. In creating one section, I asked the dancers to pick one or two parts of their bodies they were dissatisfied with or felt they had to work on. That was really interesting. Women have strange ideas about their bodies; we’re surrounded by it and we internalize it and it shows on our bodies.”
The show is one-night only, but Haun has plans for future iterations. “I’d like to do a version with artists with disabilities and with teens. There are things that come into being for young people as they change. I see it with my daughters. They’re still children and society starts treating them as though they’re women. They have a lot to navigate.” (Sharon Hoyer)
At the Studebaker Theater, 410 South Michigan in the Fine Arts Building. Saturday, November 3 at 7:30pm. $35, $20 children ages 6-18, children 5 and under free. Tickets: https://artsentertainment.thundertix.com/events/133587.
Related Stories
Perception and the Body: A preview of The Way You Look (at me) Tonight at the MCA It’s all these quite big concepts of philosophy and intersectionality and identity, but it’s also fun and lighthearted as well.- Raw Talent Refined: A Preview of "Body Passages" Poetry and dance have always shared a denigrated status across cultures for not commanding the material value of the other art forms and their attendant cultural sway, so it’s nice to see the two team up in defiance.
- Redefining Body: A Preview of Blackbird's Ventriloquy at Links Hall A meditative reflection on sound and body, movement and mind.
- Testing Bounds: A Preview of Unwinding at the Studebaker Theater Pranita (Jain) Nayar, executive artistic director of Mandala South Asian Performing Arts, is testing the bounds of the highly formal dance style she has worked in for over thirty years: the Indian classical dance Bharatanatyam.
- A Real Who's Whodunit: A Review of Whose Body? at Lifeline Theatre Dorothy L. Sayers' debut novel gets the Lifeline literary adaptation treatment.
- Private Lives In Public: A Review of Stories of the Body at Theatre Y These four stories of women and their bodies at Theatre Y make the public private and vice versa.
