Anne Waldman and Douglas Dunn
Anne Waldman and Douglas Dunn
Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, Houston, TX
October 11, 2006
Reviewed by Theodore Bale
Ann Waldman
Photo courtesy Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts
Choreographer Douglas Dunn is wearing a spiked wig and gray cotton coveralls, and he’s holding a large block of Styrofoam. As he weaves around the stage, he looks like a porcupine that just found a prize in the trash. Meanwhile, poet Anne Waldman is half shouting, half singing, “I will squawk,” and then “I will question these images.” She sways and floats as she reads. Four young women map the space with a clumsy crab-walk, and Max Dyer improvises a dissonant melody on the cello. At first it seems like perplexing chaos, but as Tanks Under Trees progresses, it’s evident that an underlying situation (not necessarily a story) binds these events together.
Dances that integrate poetry have been around forever, but poetry that becomes the backbone of a performance, that serves in the capacity of music, is still rare. In the program notes, Waldman described this stunning, one-night-only event as “a poetry-driven rhizomic collage working in performance collaboration with dance, music, and visual images.” “Rhizome” is the key word. The artists weren’t competing to dominate the stage with their virtuosity. Rather, Waldman’s provocative poetry became an underground stem transmitting new life through them at each node, a sort of strawberry plant with vivid mutations at every bend.
Dunn had about five hours of rehearsal with his dancers, all of them students in the University of Houston Dance Program. Their performance was improvised, and he didn’t want them to include any classical movement or anything associated with modern technique. He served as a kind of catalyst among them, though each woman was quite confident bowing, running, standing, colliding, and shifting the quality of movement to whatever else was happening onstage. The dancers even “read” the audience for movement cues, imitating sounds, poses, and gestures. Sometimes one would repeat another’s improvisation, creating a canon of irregular rhythm.
In a splendid duet between Waldman and Dunn, the poet played on the word “humanity,” eventually shortening it to “manatee” and thus ruminating on the natural world. While she incanted phrases like “slow moving in slow rivers,” the floor-bound Dunn undulated in a series of languorous, swerving motions.
Plenty of protest peppered all of this abstraction. “Where is the patriarch now?” asked Waldman when Dunn appeared in a mask covered with the American flag. And then, “What do your mitochondria whisper to you in the night of trenches?” See www.mitchellcenterforarts.org or www.douglasdunndance.com.
