Winifred Haun & Dancers perform with Unalakleet and Nome dancers

Last Thursday, a crowd of parents and community members filtered into the Nome Elementary School gym, piling onto the bleachers and whispering in anticipation as they stared at an impromptu performance space set up on the gym floor. The overhead lights went out, the music began, and floodlights lit up the improvised stage in a multicolored array. Dancing with the Midnight Sun had begun.
The performance was the collaborative effort of Winifred Haun & Dancers, a Chicago-based contemporary dance company, Uŋalaqłiq Iñuutchak, a Unalakleet traditional dance group and local Nome dancers. 
The Nome Arts Council supported the project and ran the lights, sound and provided the mats that made up the stage the performers danced on.
The show featured performances from Nomeites, performances from Winifred Haun & Dancers and traditional dance performances taught to the group by Uŋalaqłiq Iñuutchak. 
The finale of the show featured traditional native dance and contemporary choreography. 
Winifred Haun, the founder of Winifred Haun & Dancers, explained that the idea for the project came from a former member of the group who lived in Nome for a few years. Haun visited her in Nome, and the idea to come to the region and put on dance workshop was born. The trip was funded with a National Endowment for the Arts grant.
Amber Cunningham with Uŋalaqłiq Iñuutchak, which translates to Unalakleet Come to Life, explained that dancing halted for Unalakleet back in 1915. The bicultural teachers at the school began teaching Inupiaq and Yupik dance in the last few decades, but there wasn’t a community dance group. Cunningham and a handful of community members decided to start a dance group in 2023 and have continued performing since then.
Cunningham and her family came to Nome for the workshops and the show on Thursday night. She taught the dancers from Winifred Haun & Dancers several dances. Seal Boy, one of the dances performed on Thursday, was gifted to Uŋalaqłiq Iñuutchak by the creator, Ossie Kairaiuak. Cunningham said she had permission to teach the dance to Winifred Haun & Dancers.
Cunningham’s daughter Cassidy and cousin Roger joined her on the trip to Nome. Cunningham said that in Unalakleet, many of the recreational activities are competitive, like basketball. “It’s not like ‘Move your body any old kind of way,’” she said. “It feels very strange for them to be able to express themselves like that when they don’t see their peers doing it.”
One thing that sticks out to Haun is the difference between traditional and contemporary dance. “A lot of traditional dances are meant to be participatory,” she said. “We come from the colonizers where it’s very presentational and some people can participate and some people can’t.”
“The idea is to sort of break that down,” she added.
To Haun, dancers are not too different no matter the style they perform – dance is about what the individual can bring to the group. “There’s a common understanding, or a way of looking at the world, or a way of approaching the world that seems to me to be universal,” she said.
Part of the philosophy of Winifred Haun & Dancers is performing in community spaces – parks, libraries, museums, old houses, parks and street corners. “Not everybody can afford to buy a ticket and come to a theater and get all dressed up and go see a show, right? It’s sort of a personal belief of mine that everybody has a right to dance,” said Haun.
Even when the dance is more esoteric or experimental, there’s value in watching. “It’s okay to not know what’s happening. When you listen, you can watch dance the same way you listen to music,” she said. “You can just watch it and feel like something’s going on, like there’s some meaning.”
Robin Davis, a dancer with Winifred Haun & Dancers, said that learning the dances from Cunningham and her family was a beautiful experience. “I always love when dance is communal,” Davis said. “All the workshops we’ve been doing, having a very large range of ages and people of different experiences coming together to dance.”
Haun said that other dances the group knows involve a lot of energetic movement. The traditional dances they learned in Alaska were different. “Here, at least from what we’ve learned, it’s contained,” she said. “It’s about the center. People tend to stay in one place.”
Between July 27 and 30, seven Nomeites attended workshops, learned dance routines and prepared for a performance on Thursday evening. Noel Pardee, one of the Nome dancers attending the workshops, said she got to help choreograph part of the routine she performed. “I just think it was a very cool experience to be able to do this in Nome, especially,” she said. 
Pardee grew up dancing, but when she moved to Nome about five years ago there was no dance studio she could continue to take lessons at. She’s been taking lessons online but jumped at the chance to learn from and perform with professional dancers. “It was very nice to be able to be out on a stage again and just be able to perform in front of people,” she said. 
Pardee said it was exciting to come together and feel the emotions of the dance with her fellow performers. “I feel like dancers always have a story to tell,” she said. 
Cunningham said that the dances she picked to share – Seal Boy, Sun, and Lig Lik (Goose) – she chose because the event’s theme was dancing under the midnight sun. She said some of the songs, she dances, but for this performance she was drumming and singing. “There are certain songs that I will drum, like I’m very confident in, and there are other songs where I’m more confident in doing the motions,” she said.
Goose is one of the first songs that the group learned. Some of the members of Uŋalaqłiq Iñuutchak had learned it in school years before and found an old VHS tape of a performance that helped them piece together the rest of the movements. “Goose is about young geese getting ready to take their first flight,” said Cunningham. “That was kind of fitting for us because we are like the young geese getting ready to take our first flight when we brought the dance back to Unalakleet.