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Hubbard Street Dance Chicago Spring Series
By Laura Molzahn:
A sense of loss, of human foolishness and mortality, hangs over Hubbard Street's shadowy spring program, running through Sunday at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance. The costumes are drab and often ordinary; the music is downbeat or strange --- or both.
But the mood suits our times. And though the evening's four works were often somber, I left the theater buoyed by the sense that dance could look so hard and seriously at the dark side of human experience, especially human relationships.
There's an element of romance, or anti-romance, in every piece here. The first two dances on the bill fit together as neatly as two puzzle pieces: Alejandro Cerrudo's new "First Light" and Susan Marshall's familiar "Kiss" both deal with partings, and while Cerrudo's piece ends with a sort of death knell, Marshall's begins with a tolling bell.
"First Light" is set to a piano transcription of Philip Glass's 1993 opera "Orphee," inspired by Jean Cocteau's 1949 film based on the Greek myth of Orpheus, who lost Eurydice to the underworld. Cerrudo has been attracted to the mythic in previous, often cinematic works; "First Light" is on a more modest scale, but its duets --- creditably danced by members of Hubbard Street 2 --- do amplify the theme of lovers separated. Most of the piece sets up the final moment of loss, prefigured by the dancers passing in and out of shadow. Couples swing around each other, orbiting with the easy confidence that nothing will ever stop their perpetual-motion machine. Of course it does stop: to heavy single piano notes, the dancers retreat and disappear.
The three bells that begin "Kiss" are the opening to Arvo Part's "Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten," whose elegiac tone suffuses Marshall's love duet for suspended dancers. Unlike Cerrudo's parted lovers, these two are almost constantly entwined, yet within the limits of their ropes and harnesses they do separate and reunite, over and over, recapitulating lovers' magnetic attractions and repulsions. Their vacillating unions and separations are on a small, psychological scale while Cerrudo goes for the archetypal.
Terence Marling uses a lighter touch in his world premiere, "At 'em (Atem) Adam," but the moonstruck characters can be pathetic as well as funny. In his first mainstage dance for Hubbard Street, former HSDC dancer Marling, now an artistic associate, shows he has a knack for theater, transforming a red "heart" into a pale moon or lantern and using vastly different music to create vignettes with different moods unified by the sense that, in this world, lovers are bumblers.
Like characters in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," these ten can seem bewitched, switching partners swiftly during a sort of barn dance to music from the album "Appalachian Waltz." A section set to Ella Fitzgerald's smooth, seductive, devastating rendition of "But Not for Me" expresses both the pain and folly of love in vain. Marling doesn't always seem in complete control of the many elements in "At 'em (Atem) Adam," but he gives it a gleeful variety and freedom.
With Jiri Kylian's "27'52"," the program comes to a mysterious, breathtaking close. Hubbard Street is the first U.S. company to perform this 2002 work, whose stylish lighting and set pieces are trademarks of Kylian, former artistic director and now resident choreographer of Nederlands Dans Theater. The six dancers, especially Ana Lopez and Cerrudo, do a masterful job with Kylian's clipped choreography.
Clocking in at 27 minutes and 52 seconds, Kylian's dance manages to be both claustrophobic and expansive, thanks partly to the set design: long swaths of white marley, suspended and laid on the floor, that both confine the playing area and give it a larger resonance. Dirk Haubrich's score, based on two themes by Mahler, is made up of odd noises melodically combined and includes recorded texts in various languages played forward, then backward. The dancers too sometimes reverse their movements, which makes the claim of a straightforward running time odd: Do the rewinds count? Does the opening section, with the dancers warming up?
Often harshly angular, Kylian's movement can give an impression of antiseptic, impersonal brutality. The dance proper is a series of duets that switch out partners and switch in new ones --- and the men in particular can look cruel, manipulating the women, even shaking them. But men and women alike show each other a dancerly disaffected affection that makes the final section of entombment, lit by a murky green, a vision of tragedy that the cataclysmic ending opens out.
In these times, there's been some shrinkage in Hubbard Street's ranks. But artistic director Glenn Edgerton has maximized his resources here, by including the appealing dancers of Hubbard Street 2, using work by two talented company members, and snaring an underexposed masterwork. He's also managed to create a repertory program with a single direction and mood, no small feat.
