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Hubbard Street Dance Chicago
By Laura Molzahn:
Though Hubbard Street has never been all sweetness and light, Lou Conte did start the company off on a musical-theater foot-especially with his signature work, "The 40s." Even when Conte indulged his jones for Twyla Tharp's work in 1990 and brought in three of her early pieces, they showed that she's a hybrid: half Broadway showbiz whiz, half obstreperous modern dancer.
Nuances aside: over its 33 years, Hubbard Street has undergone substantial changes. (But fortunately not in the quality of the dancing, which remains superb.) That much was obvious on Thursday from the three repertory works in its winter series, running through Sunday at the Harris Theater. None is new, but all bear repeating. Notably, Glenn Edgerton-who replaced Jim Vincent as artistic director in August-chose to polish the saddest and most serious of the works Ohad Naharin has set on HSDC, "Tabula Rasa," which the company revisited with the Israeli choreographer on a trip to Israel earlier this year. No dance could be further from "The 40s."
First performed by Hubbard Street in 2005 and created nearly 20 years earlier, "Tabula Rasa" is even different from the often humorous or raucous "Minus 16," Naharin's best-known HSDC piece. Where "Minus 16" is a postmodern hash of vastly different vignettes, "Tabula Rasa"-also the title of the 1977 Arvo Part music-tests the limits of our patience with sameness. But both dances push the envelope of mystery, throwing out difficulties and extremes that the mind struggles to accommodate.
Part's music is crucial. Both sections are repetitive, but the first has a breathing rhythm while the second features constant high strings relieved-and dragged down-at infrequent intervals by a ripple and a very low, drawn-out note on a prepared piano. Naharin is a master at using repetitive music (like the repeated folk song of "Minus 16") to establish an emotional baseline, creating a combined dread and anticipation that underlines the performers' actions.
The most striking dancing of "Tabula Rasa" comes in the second half. Or rather, nondancing: it's as quiet as the music. One by one, each isolated and facing us in a slow-moving line, the dancers cross the stage by rocking from side to side on stiff legs, shifting their feet slightly with each shift of weight. After several aeons, one dancer near the end stops-and another bumps into him. And another bumps into her. The close of the piece is filled with triangulating interactions that are not necessarily love triangles. Instead they express a simultaneous urge to disrupt and reunite, to destroy comfort even as equilibrium is sought again.
Naharin manages to make the dancers look epic even when their movements are minimal. If "Tabula Rasa" is about romance, it makes love huge and tragic. Johan Inger's "Walking Mad," first performed by HSDC a year ago, is at the other end of the spectrum. Set to Ravel's "Bolero," it breaks love down to the lowest common denominator of adolescent madness, seen most clearly in a scene when the five men, decked out in dunce caps, form a girl-chasing pack.
Drawing on clown tricks and possibly Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks, "Walking Mad" makes human beings small and funny. But by equating madness with sexual passion, Inger sets up an intriguing world where it might just be better to be crazy than sane, the life of the party instead of a wallflower. In the piece's more thoughtful moments, the characters make "sane" choices that separate them from others and from life.
Internationally known Naharin and Inger give HSDC resident choreographer Alejandro Cerrudo some tough competition on this program. The impressive set piece of his "Off Screen," premiered last spring, is a huge length of sparkly, billowy cloth-a frame for the action that certainly suggests the glamour and transformative power of his subject, the movies. But it also nearly overwhelms the dancers and their movements. This time around, I felt I could barely see them. When they disappeared and a lush movie score took over the stage, I hardly missed them, though the music made the moment fraught and sad.
