SeeChicagoDance.com

Lar Lubovitch Dance Company

By Sid Smith

There was a long spell when we saw too little of native son Lar Lubovitch's work, but no more.

For a variety of reasons, the Chicago Dancing Festival just one of them, we've been treated in the past year to a virtual retrospective, to exaggerate just a tad. Fortunately, familiarity is breeding anything but contempt. The Joffrey Ballet's "Othello" brought new life and audiences to a classic we'd never seen and demonstrated his deftness at full-length work. This week's repertory offerings from his eponymous troupe at the Harris Theater offered fascinating insight into his musical sensibilities.

A stated purpose of the line-up was to revive his early work with minimalists Steve Reich and Philip Glass, pieces he created when those composers weren't nearly as familiar--or non-controversial. But, then, the programs offered a look at a musical style comparatively on another musical planet: jazz. Despite their polarities, both musical forms proved seemingly easy, welcoming homes for Lubovitch, whose choreography has a breezy, gossamer, appealing human touch, a flowing delicacy and what-the-heck impromptu appeal whose prettiness shouldn't be mistaken for superficiality. Lubovitch is hard at one signature choreographic task: illuminating the mysteries of music by offering up complementary dance. That's an obvious chore for the dance maker, but not as universal in our day as you might think at first glance: the highly influential Merce Cunningham approached the art from a different angle, with a different mission.

The galactic, star-like world of minimalism is a kind of open landscape Lubovitch invades and takes over. On Thursday, the company performed two classics, "North Star" (1978) to Glass and "Calvacade" (1980) to Reich, and they are exquisite, seductive and very different. In their way, they distinguish the styles of the two related but still highly individual composers.

"North Star" is fluid, magically so, it's hypnotic opening section a wave of bodies linked and moving in tandem, the dancer's individuality smoothed away by the undulating design. At times the dancers seem to float, as if swimming, yet as swimmers happily free of any water resistance. It was revealing to see the first movement again in the larger Harris, after its performance during the festival at the Museum of Contemporary Art, because, in the larger space, you get a better look at Lubovitch's intricate designs. As choreographers eventually came to do repeatedly later, Lubovitch responded to Glass by injecting little grace note moves and images, as when two dancers are alternately lifted in the midst of their quartet like human dolls, ever so quicksilver-like, noteworthy but then gone in a flash. But, in the Glass, Lubovitch turns somewhat darker, as does the music itself, as it picks up both drama and choral voices, harmonically moving toward something more momentous and maybe ominous. This is a trademark of the composer, and for Lubovitch, the shift inspires a jerky, madhouse solo, performed intensely by Jenna Fakhoury, and then a moving finale in which statuesque, lanky Reid Bartelme is an everyman standout, lifted above the troupe at times, signaling the theme of abiding struggle, of daunting human conflict met with airborn defiance, of an effort to survive and triumph--deep, resonant stuff despite a surface lightness of melody and movement.

In contrast, Reich's "Octet" is a bubbly, tinkling celebration of joy, and so is the dance in "Calvacade." By 1980, Lubovitch's affinity with minimalist aesthetics was sturdy and natural, and the designs are even more captivating here. The flowing ensemble work, interrupted here and there by a graceful breakout, eventually gets a striking, contrapuntal image by way of a male pair who emerge from the side and contravene much of the rest of the dancers with silky, vaudeville sportiness--a duet that gradually blends in with the rest. Helped by Craig Miller's ingenious lighting to make maximum use of the work's ubiquitous streamers, "Cavalcade" becomes a garland extravaganza, a buoyant folk festival infused with dance and set pieces as spartan as the music.

In arresting contrast, Thursday also included the 2005 "Nature Boy: Kurt Elling," as loving and bright in its treatment of jazz as the more recent "Coltrane's Favorite Things." Christopher Vo is a fantastic emcee and Cupid-like soloist, involved in a mysterious way with three couples, whose duets form the bulk of the work. In "Prelude to a Kiss," Lubovitch provides one of the sexiest kisses in all of the art, Katarzyna Skarpetowska facing away from the stage at the end, when Brian McGinnis pulls down her top, baring her back, and then puckers away.

But throughout, especially in the sequence starring Nicole Corea and the ever-wondrous Jonathan E. Alsberry--"Jo-Jo", I'm told, they call him--Lubovitch provides joyous, sensuous jazz imagery never obvious or overly soliciting. But it's utterly expert in riffing swing and pop while remaining intelligent modern dance and saucy romance.

"Dogs of War," to Sergei Prokofiev, is so-so in terms of its anti-war mini-drama, its narrative and imagery obvious and even hokey: Two soldiers in hand-to-hand combat show pictures of each other's beloved back home in brief bonding before their duel.

But "Dogs" is an appealing study in acrobatics and male partnering, flush with sharp moves and interplays that suggest combat rather than mimic it, a great romp for Vo and Attila Joey Csiki. Its final silent howl is thematically irresistible. The message may be heavy-handed, but it's undeniably true as well.

 

Reviewed by Sid Smith on 09/24/2010 at 11:09 AM