Hubbard Street Dance Chicago at the Shubert Theatre, through May 2
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For better and for worse, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago is the consummate professional company. Twenty-one years ago, when it was a troupe of four women performing in nursing homes and other modest venues, artistic director Lou Conte made a point of paying his dancers, a story he’s told in numerous interviews. It’s a telling bit of history–Hubbard Street has always taken pride both in treating its dancers decently and in their ability to do any dance well. Conte also made a decision years ago that fostered the troupe’s professionalism: it would not be an outlet for his own creative efforts but a company so accomplished technically that it could master the work of any choreographer. What has prevented this talented group from becoming soulless is Conte’s decency.
That decency–and a fantastic eye for what’s pleasing in dance–underlies the acquisition of a third piece by Spanish choreographer Nacho Duato this season. Rassemblement (“The Gathering”), which Duato originally made for the Cullberg Ballet in 1990, has a genuine moral backbone: more than any other dance I’ve seen Hubbard Street do, it relies on a sense of justice and moral outrage. It may even be political. A piece for eight dancers in five sections, it tells the story of a man brutalized by police or the military for no apparent reason; broken or perhaps dead, he’s reunited with his lover in reality or in a dream, and finally his community is reunited in expressions of strength and solidarity.
Another new piece this season, Kevin O’Day’s duet To Have and to Hold, also explores romantic relationships. This piece too is fundamentally theatrical–perhaps too theatrical, as O’Day relies on the music and lighting to establish an otherwise unmotivated change in his characters’ relationship. The first of the piece’s two musical selections, by Guy Klucevsek, is grinding and dirgelike, and the man and woman (Joseph Mooradian and Russo) seem burdensome to each other, even hostile: the piece opens with Russo kneeling on Mooradian’s back as he crawls onstage, periodically collapsing under her weight; a hand poked into a stomach looks like a blow. But as the second section begins, the lighting warms and the music freshens and the couple are suddenly loving, freely supporting or propelling each other. O’Day’s signature phrase in the second section–the dancers come suddenly face-to-face, look away, and briefly roll their hips–effectively captures the involuntary twitch of sexual attraction, but I wondered where all the loving-kindness came from, beyond the choreographer’s determination to move from a troubled relationship to a happy one.
