"highly entertaining, thought-provoking, and satisfying"

August 21, 2003 performance reviewed by Connell McGrath

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago is where high art meets entertainment. They are a perennial favorite at Jacob’s Pillow and they close this season at the Pillow with a varied and entertaining show this week. Hubbard Street was founded by Lou Conte in 1977, beginning with four dancers. It has grown to 23 dancers and is now under the artistic direction of Jim Vincent. Conte was the sole choreographer for the company when they started, but he quickly developed relationships with emerging and world-renowned choreographers. Jim Vincent has expanded the broad view. This company maintains a pleasing balance between innovative, demanding contemporary dance and entertainment. They are presenting a body of work at the Pillow by a variety of choreographers, demonstrating an interesting but not overreaching range.

The first piece choreographed by Nacho Duato is called Jardi Tancat (1983), which is Catalan for Closed Garden. The program notes include the following short poem and explanation.

Water, we asked for water;
and You, oh Lord, You gave us wind;
And You turn Your back on us;
as though You will not listen to us.
This appeal is portrayed in the powerful movements of three couples, who are occupied with the sewing, planting and threshing of the barren Catalonian land.

The piece is passionate and theatrical with excellent though fairly standard choreography by Duato which was executed with precision and a high degree of technical expertise by six dancers. This was Duato’s first attempt at choreography, and it won him first prize at the International Choreographic Workshop in Cologne in 1983. The music, by Maria del Mar Bonet, is in the style of Catalonian folk songs and has a plaintive, suffering and passionate air.

After the relative seriousness of the Duato piece, the next piece brought levity to the program. Choreographed by Israeli born artist Ohad Naharin, Passomezzo was created in 1989. It is a duet danced expertly on Thursday night by Christopher Tierney and Robyn Mineko Williams to music by Unknown (so say the programs notes). The music is a selection of three ancient English folk songs from the collection The Beggars Opera, Greensleeves among them. To these songs, Tierney and Williams depicted the intimate dialogue that exists in a couple. They expressed vulnerability as well as conflict, and expressed the variety of exchanges. There is humor in some of the passages. For instance, each of the dancers takes turns doing a squatting baby step during the Greensleeves refrain. However, these moments were offset by more disturbing images of the man dominating and controlling the woman in a forceful way.

Quartet for IV (and sometimes one, two or three...) is a piece choreographed by Kevin Conte to music of Kevin Volans (including White Man Sleeps performed by the Kronos Quartet). This piece was originally created for the White Oak Dance Project in 1994, and is a beautiful example of contemporary dance technique.

Quartet is a piece that exemplifies the best of modern dance movement for its own sake. Again, it was expertly danced by four Hubbard St. dancers, Thursday's dancers were Lauri Stallings, Tobin Del Cuori, Yael Levitan Sabin and Jamy Meek. Most notable was Mr. Del Cuori's performance in this piece. His lithe and natural grace were put to perfect use here, and it was hard to watch the other dancers, accomplished as they are, when he was onstage. Quartet featured the various couples dancing duets together, with alternating solos and group work. The choreography was quite lovely, absent of any clear symbolism or emotional expressiveness, pure movement. It had a flowing, light and open quality, and matched Volans’ music well.

The last piece of the evening was again choreographed by Ohad Naharin in 1999. Minus 16 was danced by the Company and is based on excerpts from the works Anaphase, Zachacha, Sabotage Baby and Moshe. It is set to an entertaining variety of music from bossa nova to a techno-disco rendition of Somewhere Over the Rainbow. It was a long and jazzy piece with the dancers dressed in black suits, Borsellino hats and white shirts. During the preceding intermission, dancer Joe Pantaleon stood in front of the curtain doing a quirky, mime-like dance to a variety of "lounge" songs. He did what my partner described as "geek" dancing, executing small awkward movements with hands, head and feet. To the audience, it seemed to be no more than an amusing segue to the next piece. However, it is beginning of the long and entertaining Minus 16. Once the audience was seated, other dancers dressed in black suits came onto the stage and began doing similar spastic dancing. Eventually, the stage was full of 16 dancers at which point they broke into a short, wild and exuberant free-for-all with limbs flying and bodies twirling.

Two notable highlights of Minus 16 were an "autobiography" passage in which a voiceover from each dancer describes an aspect of his or her life as they do a short dance improvisation. While the idea of this seemed somewhat amateurish, the actual fact of the autobiographies and the beautiful improvisations more than compensated. At the end of the piece, the dancers went out into the audience and each brought an audience member to the stage where they danced for a few minutes. This was very funny and sweet, and the audience members aquitted themselves courageously on stage.

In all, Hubbard Street Dance's 25th anniversary performance at Jacob's Pillow was highly entertaining, thought-provoking and satisfying. It is no wonder that they are invited back again and again to Becket.