by Martha Sherman
Hubbard Street Dance Chicago is a true, modern repertory company. Its breadth is substantive, both in the choreographers and dance styles it tackles. The program at Jacob’s Pillow, celebrating 40 years of dance, offered a wide sweep of moods, in a powerful demonstration of the company’s range.
The program opened with a demanding excerpt from Ohad Naharin’s 2018 version of “Decadance.” It closed with a short and joyous reprise of “The 40s,” one of Hubbard Street’s oldest pieces, choreographed by founder Lou Conte, who sat proudly in the audience as his dancers delighted with the high-spirited movement. And the pieces in the middle were just as captivating.
Naharin has choreographed for many troupes, along with his own Batsheva company. Not everyone gets the athletics and pulsing rhythm, along with the chaos and disruption of the choreographer’s Gaga movement vocabulary. Hubbard Street pulled it off, all the physicality and the complex geometry of 16 dancers, often all interwoven on the stage at once. The opening image was of the dancers in a tight pyramidal structure, and an odd single strongman (in the top hat and coat of a private eye, or given Naharin’s frequent references to them, perhaps a Hasidic scholar) who droned some instructions to the audience that fell flat. But after that – the company was off and running.
Sometimes the cast separated in lines of men and women (another Naharin reference to Jewish orthodoxy) before moving in and out of pairs and trios. The dancers created a mechanical poetry as they moved in parallels of shifting shoulders or body collapses and recoveries. The strides sometimes looked longer than the dancers’ legs, but no one pulled any punches. This was a dance to do full-out, or not bother with at all.
In a scene that was also danced just a few weeks ago at the Pillow by Naharin’s Young Batsheva dancers in that group’s own remix by Naharin, the Hubbard Street cast found its way downstage to a starkly-lit stage apron. In erratically timed solos, dancers crumpled, flailed, and pounded out dance improvisations, each triggering the start of a someone else somewhere down the line. The ghoulish lighting of their faces and bodies added an otherworldly quality to the extended sequence. When Naharin’s young dancers did the scene, they were riskier and wilder in their explosions on stage; but the Hubbard Street dancers’ solos were just as unique. Each dancer suggested a personal adaptation of Gaga, with a depth of other techniques baked underneath. And each moved as if driven by a personal demon.
The program’s central works were contrasts, first the dark, pounding “Grace Engine” (2012) by Crystal Pite, followed by playful “Lickety-Split” (2006) by Hubbard Street’s first resident choreographer, Alejandro Cerrudo.
“Grace Engine” pushed quotidian movement (a lone man wandering a dark street, or the anonymous crush of humanity parading to the cacophonous sound of traffic) into a huge and often threatening world. Steps turned into long lunges, a slip became a propulsive slide across a wide distance of the floor. With the noisy score in the background and a harsh duality of darkness and light just barely illuminating them, the cast grabbed, pushed, retreated, and opened their mouths in silent screams.
In a long closing segment, a group of women wearing slinky, black over-the-shoulder dresses throbbed to a repetitive verbal score that started with “Ignore all possible concepts and possibilities,” and built new phrases in each iteration of the score, as a voice caustically dissected the starkness of life’s repetitive fragments. The women’s sharp movements also repeated as they split across the stage. They vamped in different poses, making a collage of angles and gestures.
Now, with the first, dark half of the program behind them, the dancers expanded into the rhythms of Cerrudo’s “Lickety-Split.” The opening strings of a score by Devendra Banhart breathed a soft energy onto the stage, and the music inspired every mood in the piece. Six dancers, three men and three women, walked toward each other in a narrow horizontal band of light the split the stage, then found each other in couplings and trios that were like a dance onomatopoeia, the movement directly imitating the sound – everything we saw was exactly what we were hearing. As a man’s head nudged the hip of his partner, the two dancers curled and uncurled. They slid as the strings slid. Shoulders popped in tempo, and movement phrases ended in satisfying codas, as the musical phrases resolved.
The final work was danced to just one quick, jazzy number. “The 40s” (offered 40 years after it was premiered) held its own among its much longer partners by sheer force of will. The cast danced this work with love, and the audience loved every minute. Like Cerrudo’s piece, this dance was also linked to the rhythms and mood of the (entirely different) score. As the tune bounced with syncopated delight, the dancers literally jumped for joy – repetitive flat-footed jumps that levitated them in childlike energy.
The closing image was a sunny parallel to the program’s shadowy opening. At the high-spirited close of “The 40s,” the company members shifted into a pyramid as well, this time with wide smiles and hands splayed in a razzmatazz gesture; the crowd roared with delight. The response was a reminder that Hubbard Street Dance Chicago has become one of the dependable powerhouses of regional dance; you may not love it all equally, but if you enjoy dance, you’ll find something you like.
Copyright ©2018 by Martha Sherman
“Decadance/Chicago,” “Grace Engine,” Lickety-Split,” “The 40s”
Hubbard Street Dance Chicago
Ted Shawn Theatre at Jacob’s Pillow
Becket, MA
August 4, 2018
Cover: Rena Butler and Myles Jean Lavallee in “Lickety-Split.” Photo © Hayim Heron.
Got something to say about this? Sound off here
[Don’t miss a thing! We’ll send you a notification of every article we post if you sign up with your email. (The signup is right below, scroll down). We promise you won’t be deluged and we won’t spam you either.]
