Locals Dance Down Hubbard Street
All you musical comedy buffs out there no doubt remember that bit in Once Upon a Mattress where the Queen is teaching everyone the new dance, the Spanish Panic, and she keeps reminding everyone to “Keep it Spanish!” Sometimes choreographers heed that advice. Sometimes, equally successfully, they do not. In the performance we reviewed in Cool Cleveland last week, Lizt Alphonso Dance Cuba, the choreographers kept their Hispanic/Cuban identities front and center. In Saturday’s Hubbard Street Dance Chicago (HSDC) concert at the Ohio Theater, three Hispanic choreographers showed nothing identifiably Spanish on stage, opting instead for work that was cosmopolitan, contemporary, original, and creative.
Hubbard Street Dance Chicago maintains a well-deserved reputation for excellent dancers and interesting contemporary repertoire. Founder Lou Conte had danced in Broadway shows but during his tenure as HSDC’s Artistic Director he showed an acute appreciation for other parts of the dance world, developing and maintaining long-term relationships with both emerging and established contemporary choreographers. During the ’90s, HSDC acquired seven dances from Twyla Tharp, a spectacularly expensive and labor-intensive process. HSDC also developed a virtual transatlantic super highway to and from Nederlands Dans Theater, acquiring and maintaining in active repertoire a number of dances by European choreographers closely identified with NDT, Jiri Kylian and Nacho Duato, to name only two, and recruiting two Artistic Directors, Jim Vincent and Glenn Edgerton, who previously served as Artistic Directors for NDT.
Lately, HSDC has named one of its dancers, Alejandro Cerrudo — formerly a dancer with NDT II — as its first Resident Choreographer. Cerrudo’s first piece on Saturday’s sold-out show at the Ohio Theater, Blanco, began with the four women in fog and dim overhead lighting. Initially the music by Charles Valentin Alkan plodded along in what we’d characterize as a dirge tempo but Cerrudo and the dancers rewarded our attention with sudden and seemingly impossible extensions and turns in place.
After slow-fast-slow music by Alkan, Blanco continued with a series of solo dances supported by six preludes and fugues by Mendelssohn. A musical hodgepodge, one might say, but for us Blanco showed Cerrudo working to develop new material with the dancers, then presenting it in a way that drew us into the process.
Next on the program, Cerrudo’s Deep Down Dos presented a similar dance vocabulary but benefited enormously from its Music from Underground Spaces by Chicago Symphony Orchestra composer-in-residence Mason Bates. Bates was reportedly inspired by “the sounds of tectonic plates, crystalline caverns, and blazing infernos,” but he also seems to have had dancers in mind, for he provided not only clear and varied rhythms and tempos but a dramatic arc that would, we suspect, have given order and meaning to anything the dancers might have done.
For both of Cerrudo’s pieces, the stage was boxed in with black curtains that made entrances and exits invisible to the audience. What a contrast when the curtain went up on Victor Quijada’s Physikal Linguistiks and revealed a stage completely bare right to the firewalls with electrical cables neatly coiled on their shelves; those Ohio Theater stagehands keep a neat house.
In the midst of these and many other theatrical devices we saw the choreographer working with traditional elements of breakdance in an original way. Remember the ’80s? Breakin’? B-boys? For us those spectacular competitions, seemingly a promising dance style, mostly fizzled as a mainstream concert form because no one asked the question that Quijada does: “What else could hip-hop be? Could it be sensitive? Could it be communicative?” In Physikal Linguistiks choreographer Quijada used illusionary mime, floor rocks, and innovative acrobatics — the traditional elements of breakdance — and entertained a concert audience for a solid 30 minutes with dancing, which, while physical, intriguing and amusing, was neither spectacular nor competitive.
Understand that the breakdance vocabulary in Physikal Linguistiks, especially the acrobatics, was modest, especially compared to outliers like the Rennie Harris Puremovement concert at Cain Park in 1998. But in important ways, Quijada succeeded where Harris and his company ultimately failed. Perhaps most significantly, Quijada presented breakdancing in an expressive composition rather than the merely spectacular show that Harris and his group brought to Cain Park. Read more about Quijada in an unusually insightful interview here: Quijada.
Appropriately, when the rhythm track for Physikal Linguistiks came in it was samples of classical music rather than James Brown. Composer Jasper Gahunia, aka Lil’ Jaz, is both a DJ and a graduate of Toronto’s Royal Conservatory School where he teaches DJ technique.
The last dance on Saturday’s concert, Arcangelo, was by Nacho Duato, an established choreographer of contemporary ballets whose work is seldom seen in the U.S. Danced to the music of Arcangelo Corelli and Alessandro Scarlatti, Arcangelo is built around a series of gorgeous pas de deux in which Duato and the HSDC dancers discovered lines and movement qualities that were apt metaphors for the restrained passion and the voluptuous Baroque curves of the music. The set, gold panels on three sides of the stage, was like looking into a reliquary box (reminding us to go see the current exhibit at the Museum of Art).
A single whiney complaint might be that the movement was beset with an excessive sameness. In Arcangelo, Duato set a particularly difficult task for himself when he opted for mostly andantes and adagios — a sameness of tempo — and neglected to give each pas de deux, each relationship, a distinct identity.
But in the end, one came away thinking, “Gorgeous, all gorgeous” …all of Archangelo …and every moment of the concert.
Hubbard Street Dance Chicago performed at Ohio Theater on Sat 11/6/10.
From Cool Cleveland contributors Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas. Elsa and Vic are both longtime Clevelanders. Elsa is a landscape designer. She studied ballet as an avocation for 2 decades. Vic has been a dancer and dance teacher for most of his working life, performing in a number of dance companies in NYC and Cleveland. They write about dance as a way to learn more and keep in touch with the dance community. E-mail them at vicnelsaATearthlink.net.
One Response to “REVIEW: Chicago Dancers Wow Cleveland”
Goliat
Just note it´s CERRUDO, not CERRUDA.
😉