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Hubbard Street's fall engagement
By Laura Molzahn
The ranks have shrunk, the demands have grown, and yet Hubbard Street's dancers continue to meet them.
Like other small businesses in our harsh new economy, dance companies must cut costs and ask more of employees. The HSDC dancers are up to the task. More than up. They perform the four new (or almost new) pieces on the company’s fall program with incredible devotion and pinpoint expertise. Their stewardship of these nuanced, physically demanding, all very different pieces is on view through Sunday at the Harris Theater.
All the works play with polarities and paradoxes. Preconceptions and expectations are challenged. Courses are charted --- and changed.
For instance, the two new-ish dances by HSDC resident choreographer Alejandro Cerrudo, described as companion pieces, offer unexpected takes on opposed subjects. The two interact so provocatively it’s hard to imagine them apart.
In “Blanco,” which premiered a few weeks ago at Jacob’s Pillow, drifting clouds envelop the stage, sliced by cones of light from above --- four of them, one for each dancer. You’d expect this sky-land to be conducive to freedom. But the four women seem trapped in their light shafts, or they drift into the shadows. They rarely approach or touch one another, and their movements are so deliberate and chiseled, their looks so severe, that they seem statues of goddesses, chilly residents of some higher, not very happy realm. With movement that’s sculptured, solid, and slow moving, Cerrudo wittily undercuts the impression created by Nicholas Phillips’s ethereal set and lighting design.
The paradoxes multiply when, next, you see his “Deep Down Dos,” premiered last April with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s rendering of the score, “Music From Underground Spaces.” Composer Mason Bates was inspired to write it by a visit to the Berkeley Seismology Lab, where he heard recordings of earthquakes. And “Deep Down Dos” seems set in the underworld. Yet its movements are light, quick, risky, and highly interactive, the nine dancers apparently energized by the roaring, rippling music, the dark stage lit at times by what appears to be a miner’s headlamp. Flying arms and coats and lots of exits and entrances create the sense that this underground world is, contrary to expectations, filled with movement and change.
The last section, a grave duet, switches things up. Ana Lopez orbits Pablo Piantino; spinning like a gyroscope, they are small and human yet seem the source of all the underground movement, driving the action of vast tectonic plates. A final foreboding pose erases the cheery impression left by most of the dance.
Victor Quijada’s world premiere, “Physikal Linguistiks,” is also unpredictable but in a very different way. Often funny, it creates community both on and off the stage, threatening and eventually breaching the traditional boundaries and conventions of the theater.
The 34-year-old Quijada, head of Montreal-based Rubberbandance, started out as a break-dancing kid in LA, later moved into spots in Twyla Tharp’s and Eliot Feld’s companies, and eventually performed choreography by Balanchine. He’s covered a lot of ground personally, and “Physical Linguistiks” seems to illustrate the learning of new languages, achieved through the manipulation of one dancer by another or by several others. Physical manipulation can come across as menacing, but here it seems more helpful than coercive. By the end, however, attempts at manipulation fail, as dancers slip out of one another’s arms and away. Finally the protagonist (nimble Christian Broomhall) sheds his manipulators --- his teachers --- thereby isolating himself from his community. It’s a downbeat ending to a mostly upbeat piece.
Jasper Gahunia’s ingenious score for “Physikal Linguistiks” cuts up classical recordings into looped bits whose rhythms recapitulate those of hip-hop. Quijada’s choreography likewise creates something new out of established forms. Hip-hop moves are subtly transformed when performed this slowly and elegantly, with an impetus not entirely driven by the music, and the element of manipulation adds an unexpected theatrical dimension. Some hallmarks of hip-hop --- competition, confrontation, wavelike actions and reactions --- remain intact while the moves themselves are subtly changed.
Where Quijada’s ensemble of nine continually creates odd men (and women) out, Nacho Duato’s “Arcangelo” is admirably balanced and serene, presenting four stable couples in a series of duets. This 2000 piece, which Hubbard Street is giving its U.S. premiere, is one of those works that passes like a dream, in a stream of riveting moments. Choreography for the couples alternates straight and crooked, flexed and extended, to suggest two interlocked souls, puzzle pieces joined in ways capable of infinite variation.
Set to Corelli’s Concerti Grossi Op. 6 and finally an aria from Scarlatti, “Arcangelo” starts out in heaven and ends in hell. But the two places don’t look much different --- except that a billowing curtain separates one dancer from the other in the final duet. Though the two move together, they can’t see or touch one another in Duato’s sucker-punch metaphor for endless separation from God.
