Knowing this has been coming hasn’t exactly made it easy. I went tonight to review Hubbard Street Dance Chicago for the first time, its Spring Series running through Sunday at the Harris. Joining the company in 2002 is what brought me to Chicago—the evening it’s presenting includes two works I know intimately, one I’ve seen many times and two fresh on the scene.
Let’s start with the new.
I was informed Andrea Miller’s Blush was going to be on the program; I didn’t know it was going to be performed by the junior company, Hubbard Street 2. Mind you, I’m not complaining. All six dancers showed the chops-beyond-their-years for which HS2 has long been known, throwing themselves into Miller’s heavily-Naharin-influenced movement with abandon and consideration in balanced proportion. It’s just not as strong a piece as I had hoped. The vocabulary is fresh and commands attention, and the composition (owing just as much to Naharin’s example) remains concerned with the entirety of the stage space throughout. Everything is certainly “there” (Miller could do far worse by me, of course, than emulating one of my favorite choreographers). I just didn’t see anything besides the Batsheva pedigree (the Utah native was once a member of its junior company) and adoption of Gaga techniques on display. As an étude or précis it’s impeccable, but as an artistic statement it’s a void, the mixtape score (M.I.A., Fuck Buttons, Pimmon and Alog) only underlining its debt. Again, though, kudos to HS2’s dancers, administration and artistic staff: These kids are the Treadstone of Chicago dance.
Ana Lopez and Benjamin Wardell in Off Screen. Photo by Todd Rosenberg.
Alejandro Cerrudo’s world premiere Off Screen is his third for HSDC. I wouldn’t call it a trilogy, and he doesn’t either, but there’s something continuous running through the works, a sense that he’s thinking about or at least aware of how his body of work is beginning to communicate with itself. There’s a fine line between recognizable elements of a personal style and empty rehashes of tricks that have worked in the past—Cerrudo has both feet planted firmly in the first case. He’s exploring a specific territory and staying close to his threads of investigation, but all the while finding new things within this palette. Off Screen is more leisurely than his other works at revealing a shape in the mind; what seemed at first to be a dropoff in formal rigor turned out (satisfyingly) to be an increased confidence in his talent for arc. It’s too rare these days to see dance that doles out information with this kind of attention to measure, and I appreciated greatly being taken for a thinking person. Read More…
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