Hubbard Street Dance Chicago’s American Aerobicism

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago has its own particular movement language down pat: It emulates the way Europeans have adapted the textures and rhythms of classic modern-dance vocabulary, but it has combined it with an American aerobicism. It’s not unsophisticated, but it’s also readily accessible. It has not only a style but even a culture of its own: When the entire company or most of it is onstage together one senses a particular cohesion among the dancers. But as vigorously as they danced all the works on view, it wasn’t often that one saw them really fulfill themselves.The company performs two programs during its current season at the Joyce. I saw both last week, and liked the second program better, mostly because it contained Doug Varone’s 2006 “The Constant Shift of Pulse,” which the company took up this year.Its invincible momentum suited the company, and they danced the work full tilt. Mr. Varone contrasts cyclonic storm fronts and stop-action tableaux. Gales of dancers scatter and regroup by means of falls, rolls, push-ups. When the twisters subside, individual connections exist in an interim space between physical proximity and actual intimacy. On the sonic front, John Adams’s “Hallelujah Junction” keeps things plangent.Each Hubbard Street program contained a recent work by Alejandro Cerrudo, a young dancer in the company. In “Extremely Close,” space is closed in or opened out again and again to provide new frames for the dancers. The piece is dominated by large white panels that demonstrate their own kinetic volition. The dancers push the panels or the panels seem to be pushing the dancers, or the panels appear suddenly to swallow up the dancers’ space or lay down architectural demarcations issued from up on high, almost like a deus ex machina. Silence is overtaken by snatches of minimalist piano, much the way the sliding panels make their unpredictable intrusions.“Extremely Close” has the self-consciousness of a young person’s beginning ventures into a new field. In Mr. Cerrudo’s “Lickety-Split,” dancers rev up their motors via Forsythian stretches, concavities, and inversions, executed to Devendra Banhart’s twangy vocals, proceeding through an obstacle course of evanescent couplings. At times, Mr. Cerrudo seems like an authentic spokesman for his time and place.“Bardo,” which opened the first program, was choreographed for the company by Toru Shimazaki in 2006. There’s smoke and mysticism and there are passages between altered states of existence, to music by Dead Can Dance that functions atmospherically. It begins with a stage-full ensemble, around which a lone figure is jogging in isolation. The dancers’ quivering and quicksilver limbs give new meaning to “shake a leg.” All is chastened silence, however, in the moments of arrested, suspended, out-of-body transference, principally the final duet danced by Meredith Dincolo and Yarden Ronen. “Bardo” aspires to profundity as much as, if not more than, it is able to achieve it. But better to strive for depth than not.Ohad Naharin’s duet “Passomezzo” was created in 1989 for the second company of Nederlands Dans Theater, from which hails Hubbard Street’s artistic director, Jim Vincent, who brought the piece into the company in 2001. Robyn Mineko Williams and Terence Marling wear bizarre costumes designed by Mari Kajiwara. He’s in suspenders and knee pads, among other things. He frog-walks in deep plié, then goes offstage and returns in time to field her in a move that just calls out for a partner. On the sound track, someone warbles the centuries-old standard “Greensleeves.” Mr. Marling stays abjectly on his knees much of the time, while Mr. Naharin lets loose some of his trademark auto-body-beating and throws in a few closed-hold ballroom whirls for good measure. Hubbard Street’s couple made it good, clean, kinky fun.Kinky and laugh-out-loud fun was to be had watching Lucas Crandall’s “The Set,” which he choreographed for the company earlier this year. The costumes are mid-19th century and we’re privy to one of the Victorian era’s proverbial vile seducers, in this case a rather indeterminate one, played in drag by Mr. Marling. This creature has designs on both what seem to be wife and husband, played by Shannon Alvis and Mr. Cerrudo. Tall as Mr. Marling is, he was able to transcend gender to the point where he seemed like a hermaphroditic creature on the order of Greek mythology’s Tiresias. The action takes places on, above, and around a couch, placed center stage, which functions something like the one in Nijinska’s “Les Biches,” as sheltering bower of bliss as well as abyss over which the dancers keep disappearing to the deliberately incongruous music of Bach.A program note explained that Mr. Vincent’s “Palladio” was inspired by the 16th-century Italian architect. But what it really had to do with Palladio is anyone’s guess. The piece begins with two men entering from the wings, enmeshed in harness-belt chains. There are short, dialogue-ish duets of taps and flicks and each dancer’s response to them, a longer and more confrontational duet, followed by a bacchanal. The votive-light-carrying corteges of Nacho Duarte’s “Gwana” didn’t seem exactly new, but music from both north and south coasts of the Mediterranean as well as the conviction and urgency supplied by the dancers made it worth seeing.

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago’s American Aerobicism

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