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Hubbard Street Dance at Annenberg
LEWIS WHITTINGTON
Hubbard Street Dance Chicago has long been known for its athletic prowess and versatility in many dance disciplines. This fleet troupe of 23 dancers owns 46 repertory pieces from modern ballet choreographers as daring and diverse as Lar Lubovitch, Ohad Naharin, Twyla Tharp and Jiri Kylián. Since its current artistic director Jim Vincent took over from Lou Conte, they’ve become the wild card of the Annenberg Dance Celebration series. This concert amply fulfilled the spirit of the series.
Vincent was dancer, choreographer and eventually ballet master under Kylián with the revered Nederlands Dans Theater, and that influence pervaded this dynamic, meaty program of four stylistically diverse works. The dancers’ physicality both as individuals and as an ensemble shows brilliant clarity in neo-classical and modern idioms— and, in William Forsythe’s “Enemy in the Figure,” the execution of one diamond-hard piece of modern dance.
The night started with Marguerite Donlon’s “Strokes Through the Tail,” set to the vivace movements in Mozart’s Symphony 40 with a clever idea: The dancers embodied the notes moving across the composition paper, as in an old Warner Bros. cartoon.
Erin Dershine (dressed in an elegant eggshell bodice tulle gown) stated the themes that cued the other “notes”— five men dressed in spandex shorts and black tails. It reminded me of Michael Hollinger’s play Opus (now at the Arden), in which the trials of a string quartet provide a vehicle for examining the interplay between musical notes and between people.
After quick costume changes— as quick as Mozart melody progressions— the men ended up in the tulle and Dershine in tails; then everyone was in tails except for the hapless dancer Martin Lindinger, who was left in tulle-drag. At one point the tried to jeté to the wings and was shoved back onstage.
Donlon‘s choreography is alternately literal and figurative, and the dancers’ animation leads to step-to-note moments of dance chain reactions worthy of the Three Stooges, especially in a black tail-note pile-up of men that’s sheer madcap physical comedy.
Next was Julian Barnett’s “Float,” with Dershine locked in a bedroom duet with Isaac Spencer. The often spastic interaction between them suggested a tortured affair, a drugged-out romance or just plain non-communication. It seemed like a scene from a incomplete work from Barnett. Nevertheless, both dancers performed it with conviction.
After the break, the curtain rose on a wavy metal partition at center stage, two women dressed in white bodysuits writhing around each other in the corner of the stage in front of a traveling industrial light unit, and another dancer in the dark beating a wall. Slowly, William Forsythe’s “Enemy in the Figure” unfolded.
The creepy lighting effects subverted perspective, and Thom Willems's electronic soundscape created a surrealistic dance noir that could have been directed by Fritz Lang (or Fellini, I can‘t decide which). The thunderous central section suggested an unleashed dance-beast that had been let out of the cellar.
The 11 dancers, costumed in stark black or white costumes (some with fringe that drew the eye to body lines), kept the level of suspense high, executing Forsythe's harrowing choreographic cyclones full of fragmented duets, group agitation, feverish pirouette runs and idiosyncratic solos.
Julia Wollrab and Patrick Simoniello flew into an antagonistic modern tango that kept evolving and left you breathless. This would have been a completely pretentious and deflated work in a company that lacked Hubbard‘s technical clarity, elite athleticism and artistic guts. Forsythe, director of Ballett Frankfurt, only allows one other American company to perform this ballet.
The finale was Nacho Duato’s “Gnawa” set to a mixed score of Spanish and North African rhythms and evoking evoking Arabian, Hassidic and regional dances from the Mediterranean. Duato, artistic director for Compañía Nacional de Danza of Spain, creates lush and sensual environments on the dance stage, and “Gnawa” was no exception. The lights came came up on Penny Saunders and Tobin Del Cuore, dressed in fleshy tights, moving in slow motion through a cluster of ten dancers. The women were dressed in black dance gowns and the men were bare-chested with sandy field togs.
Duato‘s gender-segregated communal circles, with dancers in arm locks, broke away to ritualized male/female friezes and processionals. Duato paints dramatic, even iconic, pictures of regional world dance. Saunders and Del Coure’s central pas de deux was so fluid that they spun themselves into transcendent intimacy past any sexual scenario. I can’t think of another modern Western company that could perform this level of cultural dance without watering down Duato’s rich cultural expression.
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