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Hubbard Street Dance Chicago
Now celebrating its landmark 35th Anniversary Season, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, under the artistic direction of Glenn Edgerton since 2009, is one of the most original and forward-thinking forces in contemporary dance. The core purpose of Hubbard Street is to bring artists, art and audiences together to enrich, engage, educate and transform lives through the experience of dance. Hubbard Street serves as an emblem of the city’s international cultural profile and continues its role as a leader in the field of dance, pushing the art forward by creating new works, diversifying repertoire and cultivating the next generation of dancers and choreographers.
Hubbard Street Dance Chicago grew out of the Lou Conte Dance Studio, when in 1977 several aspiring young artists approached dance teacher/choreographer Lou Conte to teach tap classes. At the time, the studio was located at the corner of LaSalle Street and Hubbard Street, which is how the company acquired its name. Within a decade it began to attract nationally known choreographers to create dances for the Company. Conte served as director for 23 years, during which he developed relationships with emerging and world-renowned choreographers including Lynne Taylor-Corbett, Margo Sappington, Daniel Ezralow, Nacho Duato, Jirí Kylián and Twyla Tharp, all of whom helped shape Hubbard Street’s repertoire into what it is today.
In 2000, Jim Vincent stepped into the role of Artistic Director. Vincent worked to further expand the company’s programming, repertoire and acclaim, while also building a legacy of new choreographic development. He introduced initiatives that have become staples of Hubbard Street’s programming, including the Inside/Out Choreography Workshop, during which Hubbard Street dancers create original choreography for their peers; and the Choreographic Fellowship, which identifies and develops emerging choreographic talent from within the company. Dancers Alejandro Cerrudo and Robyn Mineko Williams, as well as Rehearsal Director Terence Marling have all developed works for the company. Dancers Penny Saunders and Jonathan Fredrickson have also choreographed works for Hubbard Street 2 (the second company) through Hubbard Street’s annual National Choreographic Competition.
In 2009, then Associate Artistic Director Glenn Edgerton stepped into the role of Artistic Director. Soon after, he named Alejandro Cerrudo Hubbard Street’s first Resident Choreographer. Cerrudo has created ten works for the company, and his first full length work will launch the Company’s 35th Anniversary Season. Edgerton’s dynamic artistic vision for fostering new works and strengthening the company’s repertoire while cultivating and deepening relationships with collaborative partners has fast become a reality. Since becoming Artistic Director, Edgerton has secured new commissions and repertoire hits by master and notable choreographers including Jirí Kylián, Nacho Duato, William Forsythe, Mats Ek, Twyla Tharp, Ohad Naharin, Victor Quijada, Aszure Barton and Sharon Eyal to name a few.
Key to Hubbard Street’s mission is to cultivate collaborative partnerships with Chicago’s most significant cultural and community organizations. Since 2000, Hubbard Street has established partnerships with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, presenting new and existing choreography set to orchestral music performed by the symphony; the Art Institute of Chicago, producing dance works within art exhibits and free information sessions to the public to explore the vital connection between dance and art; Illinois Institute of Technology School of Architecture, re-imagining the space in which dance is performed; and Rush University Medical Center, which helped establish the HSDC Parkinson’s Project, using contemporary dance techniques to improve the mobility and quality of life for participants.
Today, the main company is comprised of 17 dancers who display unparalleled versatility and virtuosity. One of the only American dance companies to operate year-round, Hubbard Street continues to produce bold and passionate performances in Chicago, at national and international celebrated dance venues, and through some of the most cutting-edge dance programs at prestigious universities around the country. While many contemporary dance peers are single-choreographer organizations, Hubbard Street has always been a repertory company, representing numerous choreographers and styles. The company in its entirety has grown to be recognized as a leader in the creation and development of new choreography, unique collaborations and innovative production concepts.
Its importance is based both as a repository of work from some of the 20th and 21st century’s best contemporary choreographers and as a commissioning agent of new works, having commissioned and presented almost 200 new and acquired dance works throughout its history. Critically acclaimed for its exuberant, athletic and innovative repertoire, Hubbard Street is always changing and evolving while maintaining the highest artistic standards. Additionally, Hubbard Street now offers a Summer Intensive, which provides concentrated training in ballet and modern technique classes, repertoire rehearsals, dance history lectures and health and wellness presentations to pre-professional dancers from across the nation.
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Hubbard Street Dance Chicago: Summer Series
Where : Harris Theater for Music and Dance
When : 05/31/2012 - 06/03/2012
Cost : $25 & up
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A Thousand Pieces: Hubbard Street Dance Chicago
Where : Harris Theater for Music and Dance
When : 10/18/2012 - 10/21/2012
Cost : $0
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Hubbard Street Dance Chicago Winter Series 2012
Where : Harris Theater for Music and Dance
When : 12/06/2012 - 12/09/2012
Cost : $0
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Hubbard Street Dance Chicago "Spring Series"
You can talk about brilliance and daring and fabulous dancing. But the bottom line is whether a dance takes us to a new and magical world --- and whether it's a world we want to visit.
Alejandro Cerrudo takes us there, however mysterious his "there" is, in the new "Little Mortal Jump." It's the pumping heart (and the only premiere) of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago's spring series, running through Sunday at the Harris. In fact, "brilliant and daring and fabulous" pretty much defines the program one way or another. But the world that's already calling me back is Cerrudo's.
HSDC's resident choreographer since 2009, Cerrudo really comes into his own in the highly complex, chameleonic "Little Mortal Jump." That's despite, or perhaps because of, the way he mines his own previous work in this half-hour dance for ten. Largely devoted to the interactions of four couples, it looks at first like Cerrudo's 2006 "Lickety-Split" (and borrows a trick or two from Johan Inger's "Walking Mad"). Whimsical music even suggests the avant-folk Devendra Banhart score for "Lickety-Split."
The first couple's springy, unpredictable, lightning-fast doings are played for laughs. Jessica Tong and Pablo Piantino bounce at each other, feint and retreat, attempt to lasso their partner with circled arms. It's like watching Tigger court Roo. The second couple, who seem even younger, are also funny. Using a little stage sleight-of-hand and some Velcro (recalling Ashley Roland's "Captain Tenacity"), Kevin Shannon and Alice Klock discard their husks and step, shining new, into a shiny new love.
The grab-ass aspect of "Little Mortal Jump" disappears, however, with a transitional ensemble sequence that dissolves all individual quirks in a universal vision of being knocked off center. The off-kilter theme continues in the third duet, played straight and danced tenderly by Garrett Anderson and Penny Saunders. And in the fourth duet, the interplay between Ana Lopez and Jesse Bechard achieves a mythic resonance. A deep and inexplicable union replaces petty romantic preoccupations.
How does Cerrudo go from the silly to the transcendent in "Little Mortal Jump?" A similar chasm in his duet "Never Was," which debuted just two months ago, also enhances rather than weakens the dance. In both cases, carefully chosen but jaggedly pasted-together musical selections help create the schism --- and bridge it. So do the set pieces Cerrudo designed for "Little Mortal Jump": very quotidian dark, sturdy cubes on wheels magically reconfigure the space in seconds, with help from Michael Korsch's lighting. Like Cerrudo's earlier "Extremely Close" and "Off Screen," this piece seems inspired by, and aspires to, the swift facility and lush effects of cinema, which swell the heart and transport the mind.
By comparison to Cerrudo's quicksilver world, Alonzo King's in "Following the Subtle Current Upstream" is a stodgy old tourist trap. Created in 2000 for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, it looked old-fashioned even back when I first saw it, in 2001. The Hubbard Street dancers, who gave the piece its company premiere last year, now do it so well that they made me see its good points: the extremely subtle articulations, right down to the tips of the fingers, the nuances of the torso. The piece really takes off in the speedy final section, set to Zakir Hussain's tabla music. But the "sexy" duet is lurid, given the woman's seriously splayed legs. And somehow trips like King's to the "primitive" and "elemental" now seem Disney-esque.
Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar's "Too Beaucoup," commissioned by Hubbard Street and first performed a year ago, makes me laugh a little --- though the dancers never crack a smile. Watching it is like being dropped into a life-size video game peopled by 16 fierce, scary, humorless virtual beings with identical white hair --- punky for the boys, bobbed for the girls --- and colorless eyes (thanks to contact lenses). Or we might be at some Platonic ideal of a dance club, the diabolical conception of a choreographer asking, "What would it look like if club dancers moved in perfect unison, or perfect canon, to the virtually indistinguishable phrases of techno music?"
But it becomes more than that. DJ Ori Lichtik's varied mix includes not only 80s punk but jazz and Leonard Cohen. And eventually the dancers are not interchangeable, and the effect is not comic or slick. In yet another transformation, the robot becomes human, the crowd becomes the individual, anonymity becomes anomie.
Hubbard Street Dance Chicago
By Sid Smith:
Hubbard Street Dance Chicago's relationship with hotshot Jorma Elo pays off nicely with an original work created for the company, a piece sporting the pun-tinged title "Bitter Suite," unveiled during the company's engagement that ended Sunday at the Harris Theater.
"Bitter" isn't, as it happens, an adjective that comes much to mind in this unusual, richly gestured work. Much of the time, the hands are as important here as the feet. The odd, perplexing mini-drama taking place among the eight dancers is often signaled by repeated flutters and jitters of their hands. A dancer begins the piece by igniting the choral tableau with barely perceptible hand signals, and thereafter follows frenetic, Keystone Kops interaction, bodies bouncing up and down, frantic graspings as if at invisible bugs, and all manner of strange interactions and sequences.
Interspersed with all this, and gradually taking over, are flowing moves of more classical dance, lifts, though here and there with a twist, for instance, but fast-moving and lyrical dance that is one reason Elo has been getting so much attention. A lot of this, however eccentric, is beautiful.
On a more basic level, "Bitter Suite" reveals Elo to be the musical maestro most choreographers in the end aim to be. Besides some music by Claudio Monteverdi, two crucial segments are set to Felix Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto, one of the great works of Western art. Not Beethoven's ninth symphony, maybe, but right up there, as melodic and exciting as it is a bear for any violinist taking it on. Significantly, Elo all but ignores its actual concerto form, in that only now and then does a single dancer represent or articulate the violin solos by him or herself. Elo instead employs the wondrously gorgeous music for a feast of choral dances, breathless ensemble work, some of it loving, some of it singular and startling, moving towards the music's galvanizing finish as if to a typical finale.
But then he doesn't end. He instead returns to a more mournful score and a kind of elegiac finish, a reprise of the cluttered chorale image of the opening, segueing to a haunting romantic embrace--perhaps one laced with that elusive bitterness of the title--for his ending. This all flirts with the essence of dance--movement that creates its own universe and touches us transcendently in ways that defy words or language.
It's not a perfect work and may well be revised. I overhead someone in the know suggesting he'd already made trims between Thursday's opening and Sunday's matinee, when I caught up with the piece at the Harris. But Hubbard has a nice, new solid showpiece for its arsenal, one it can proudly boast it launched, and Elo demonstrates again, with his relentless exploration of hands and arms and his sometimes intriguing originality with choral arrangement, that he is a choreographer hell-bent on looking different, on creating choreography that's unique and distinctive.
This engagement was a glowing and pleasing one all around. Alejandro Cerrudo's "Lickety-Split" always impresses with its speed and imagination. This time I noticed how beautiful and sweet it can be. No wonder so many of us took notice when he premiered it as his first work for the troupe--this is clearly something much richer than a dancer simply trying his hand at dance making. Sunday, it also gave Kevin Shannon, in key solos, his best moments since Doug Varone used him so smartly. He's not so much a showy dancer limned with spark, a la former Hubbard Streeter Jamy Meek. But he's an ineffably smooth and articulate one, a dancer who commands attention without a hint of look-at-me overkill. He anchored the troupe in a work that, no matter how often it's viewed, always delights, always seduces and always works, and can now be remembered as the one that launched the career of the troupe's first official resident choreographer.
Lucas Crandall's "The Set" is another Hubbard-grown work that's showing remarkable resilience, remarkable in that it's a comedy, and humor often fades quickly in dance. Once you know the gag, you lose interest. Here the comedy stems from a goofball Edwardian menage a trois made up of a man, a woman and a man in drag. What impressed me this third time around is the subtlety, shrewdness and craft Crandall manages in the choreography itself--kicky riffs on ballet, ballroom and general movement that energize the humor, just as the humor almost naturally leads to the dance. That nifty synthesis is what makes "The Set" a true tour de force, recalling the heydays of Pilobolus, the Trocks or even Lotte Goslar. These are laughs unique to dance, from the way she kisses a hand and wipes it on the clothing of another to the silky way a swinging leg leads to comic disaster.
"Jardi Tancat" (Penny Saunders, among a solid ensemble, riveted my attention yet again) remains one of the best works from Europe the troupe has acquired, unimpeachable evidence of the power and majesty of Nacho Duato. Please, Hubbard, if possible, bring us more of his work.
