Dawdlin'

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago

by Marcia B. Siegel

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago is an antidote to the overwrought pyrotechnics of most contemporary dance. With a repertory from a broad range of choreographers, the company gave two programs at the Emerson Majestic last weekend, courtesy of Dance Umbrella. All four works on opening night appealed to the audience with juicy, plainspoken movement, structure for the mind, and lighthanded humanism.

Hubbard Street used to be a jazz company, and it retains traces of show-biz blandness -- that uninflected, on-all-the-time personality you see in Broadway dancers. But the wattage is toned down and the energy is relaxed and companionable. Another trend-bucking thing about the company was the absence of spectacle. In Hong Kong recently I looked at angel dancers flying about on wires, a dance with a movable ice rink and an Olympic skater, dances with smoke and strobe lights, a dancer being filmed by a television camera and simultaneously screened on a monitor, and a duet between an increasingly naked dancer and his life-sized double on screen. Hubbard Street put the emphasis on dancing, with a few drapes and props as the only effects. The opening program progressed, or rather decomposed, from a somber idealism to playfulness to low comedy.

Nacho Duato's Rassemblement, with a score (by Toto Bissainthe) of what might be West Indian folk songs with intermittent mutterings by a gravel-voiced speaker, depicted incidents in some kind of tribal community. Specific characters -- leaders, victims, policemen, lovers -- would announce themselves with descriptive dances, but the events that shaped these roles seemed erased or maybe forgotten. Was the big, strong woman who danced while the group surged in and out a priestess? Was the man lying on the floor throughout the first section dead or sleeping? When he "awoke," his solo dance indicated wariness and fear; he was a fugitive. Why? Caught and thrown down, he was later made to disappear by the priestess woman and two of her assistants. After a duet by a young couple, the tribe turned away from the priestess as she danced another solo, then celebrated with a communal dance oriented almost entirely to the audience. Finally, the whole group ran to one corner and the fugitive tried to escape. On the word "Liberté!" he climbed up the backs of the crowd but was caught by the heels and pinioned upside down.

Even though I didn't understand this murky dance, it felt utterly predictable.

Kevin O'Day's Quartet for IV juxtaposed two bouncy couples with some minimalist violin music by Kevin Volans. O'Day's movement style is derived from Twyla Tharp, with whom he danced for several years: the plush plié that allows the body to meld with the floor on every step, the easy-swinging arms and expressive shoulders, the smooth interlinking of modern, jazz, and ballet styles. Also like Tharp, O'Day recycles his choreographic material, so for instance the couples at one point change partners and repeat whole sequences. These once-told phrases, repeating in a compositional frame, give the audience another way of following the dance; the steps and the people doing the steps acquire an additional layer of resonance.

In Lady Lost Found, Daniel Ezralow used charming and rhythmically inventive Percy Grainger arrangements of English folk songs, a great asset, I thought. Ezralow put the tall, gawky Jamy Meek in a kilt while the other four dancers wore casual everyday clothes, but the dance didn't otherwise attempt to acknowledge the music's ethnicity.

The ensemble sorted itself out various ways. Meek was the odd man out while the two other men and the two women danced a slow double duet to "Danny Boy." The women chummed together, skimming in and out to watch the antics of the men. To "What Shall We Do with the Drunken Sailor" they all twirled in almost out-of-control euphoria, reversing directions and starting again.

I was surprised to see Ezralow working so musically, and after Jirí Kylián's Sechs Tänze (Mozart) I was almost convinced the program had got the two choreographers mixed up. Ezralow has a long career of dancing macabre humor, beginning with Paul Taylor and on to Pilobolus, Momix, ISO, and David Parsons. But Kylián's oafish burlesque of the music (eight dancers in 18th-century underwear, wigs, and white face make-up) was also the kind of thing Europeans love -- maybe they've lived with Mozart long enough to use him for a wet noodle. The clumpy burlesque people rushed around, bumped into each other, flapped their hands in time to the musical ornamentation -- there were surrealistic props, simulated decapitations, and definite overtones of the Marquis de Sade.