Hubbard Street Dance Chicago’s all-William Forsythe season, through Sunday, October 18th at the Harris, goes a long way toward distinguishing this superb company as a major living gallery of seminal contemporary choreography.
The third in Hubbard Street’s series of one-choreographer seasons, the all-Forsythe program presented the U.S. premiere of “N.N.N.N.” (2002); “Quintett” (1993), first performed by HSDC in 2012, the only U.S. company to perform the work; and “One Flat Thing, reproduced” (2000), a Hubbard Street premiere. (Jiří Kylián and Alejandro Cerrudo were the subjects of Fall 2014 and Summer 2015 seasons respectively.)
The plus side of a one-choreographer program is the opportunity to observe the larger scope and achievement of that artist’s contribution. Showing multiple pieces back to back in a single evening exposes the connecting threads that form a unique creative process. As in a visual art show, viewing a collection of one artist’s work also gives the audience immediate access to comparing and contrasting elements in each and deriving greater meaning, the idea being that the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
It’s a fair argument for both Kylian and Cerrudo. In the case of Forsythe, that’s questionable. While each of the three Forsythe pieces was in itself striking and emblematic of unique choreographic vision, collectively they merged into a sameness that ultimately dulled the eye and cumulatively took the edge off edgy aspects of all three.
“N.N.N.N.” originally choreographed for a quartet of men, found its translation here in two mixed gender couples, an interesting choice that contextualized the movement significantly differently, essentially creating a new piece. Taking a cue from the program notes, the four dancers represent “a mind in four parts.” Watching the four interacting as a quartet, you could certainly imagine neurons firing in command central of a single organism’s brain. However, with two male-female couples, one can’t help but observe the implications certain movements impose on the male-female relationship. Whether of a sexual or platonic nature, mixed gender differs from same-gender interaction by sheer virtue of contrasting physical structure and capabilities, as well as deeply-ingrained cultural norms. In this case, it also provided an element of gentle humor for a delighted audience.
Whether the piece lost or gained from the choice is a matter of conjecture, but for this observer, it was an interesting experiment that, rather than heightening the tension between bodies, diluted the original concept. The strength of the piece lies in the electricity of action/reaction in a constantly-shifting theater game of freeze-tag, where you never know who is going to initiate a chain-reaction that evolves into a whole new spatial construct. The dancers wrap around, under, over and in between each other, separating and coming together again like recombinant DNA. Performed to precision by the infectiously engaging team of Alicia Delgadillo, Florian Lochner, Ana Lopez, and Andrew Murdock, the piece is centered on the breath, exaggerated by the dancers’ audible respiration, which propels a swinging arm, leg or torso, the momentum from which drives the movement in fluctuating intervals of duration and force. Sudden stops punctuate the spatial picture with striking stillness, creating both an internal rhythm and external shape. As the momentum increases, repetitive movement accelerates, pushing the abstraction to a system overload that spills into a paradigm for human behavior. As a compositional study on the breath, “N.N.N.N.” is a playful investigation that mesmerizes with ingenious movement discoveries, for the audience as well as the stellar HSDC dancers.
“Quintett” juxtaposes three men and two women in various combinations of solos, duets, and trios with an inert hunk of a movie projector and Gavin Bryar’s vocal/orchestral composition, “Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet.” The augmenting volume and spatial journey of the single sung phrase, whose words are unintelligible, repeats incessantly throughout the piece and has no apparent connection to the movement, other than to surround the energetic proceedings of the dancers with the pathos of a desolate soul. The piece begins with highly-structured balletic form that emphasizes the presentational qualities of Checchetti positions of the body, pirouettes, beats, double tours, and jetés. (We don’t usually get to see Hubbard Street’s balletic competence this exposed, even though their virtuosic technique is anchored in ballet, but it was fun to see Forsythe’s “ballet in the raw” on them.) Gradually, bursts of wiggles and waves interrupt balletic formality. Upright bodies begin to collapse, body slaps and claps add rhythmic interference, and the ballet eventually dissolves into increasingly abstract shapes. Extremes of fast and slow movement couple with runs off and on stage as the dancers shuffle partners.
The token climax of the piece is the seemingly arbitrary activation of the movie projector, which casts a montage of black and white clouds across an upstage wall. The repetition of the sung phrase, a folksy hymn in the worn voice of an old man, makes for calculated annoyance as the expectation of “something else” never develops. The same can be said for the choreography, which exists in a kind of energy stasis, going on in its way like the old man. He must be traveling the same road back stage for ever and ever, which is about how long this piece seemed. Perhaps that’s the point.
“One Flat Thing, reproduced” thrust twenty large steel tables in a dangerous rush toward the audience, navigated by a cast of fourteen dancers, each of whom has a unique movement “score.” The improvisational factor of the piece lies in the fact that initiation of each dancer’s movements, phrasing, and timing is tied to specific cues from specific other dancers, effecting complex patterns of hair-pin chain-reactions above, around, under, and on top of the tables and with each other. Aside from the novelty of the obstacle course the tables provided, the movement was reminiscent of that in the two preceding pieces, with sweeping arcs, acrobatic body flips, and Rube Goldberg machine-like inter-workings. As Thom Willems’ electronic sound effects grow increasingly frantic, so does the pace of the dancing, until it all culminates in a fiercely sensational exit upstage.
As different as each of the circumstances of these three pieces, the movement ideas and dynamics are so similar as to make the whole evening seem like one three-act ballet. This is the downside of a single choreographer program, where less could very well have been more.