Hubbard Street Dance performing Nacho Duato’s “Gnawa.” Photo by Todd Rosenberg
Friday night, Chicago’s well-respected Hubbard Street Dance stopped through town for one-night-only engagement at the Paramount, presenting four works. Three of them were re-stagings of HSDC’s work from the last decade, sandwiching the night’s main-event: Finnish choreographer Jorma Elo’s Bitter Suite, which debuted earlier this month in Chicago (Seattle was the second city to get to see it).
The bill seemed designed to keep the audience happy with the Elo piece. Alejandro Cerrudo’s Lickety-Split, set to music by Devendra Banhart, was an occasionally touching, generally charming piece about relationship tensions. Music with lyrics is frequently distracting when used to score a dance, and that was true here, but there was some impressive dance, particularly the male solo (performed, if I’m correct, by Justin Hortin), the only movement of the night that remotely hearkened back to the company’s jazz roots.
Elo’s piece was third, sandwiched between Lucas Crandall’s comic love-triangle The Set (funny, but almost too audience-pleasing) and Nacho Duato’s exuberant Gnawa. Jorma Elo is extremely in-demand these days (his work has been presented this month in Portland and Boston as well), but for all the hype, his piece didn’t seem to go anywhere.
Bitter Suite is set in a sort of post-human, futuristic world (complete with glittery, Star Trek-esque costumes). The dancers enter with mechanical, inhuman movements somewhere between robotic and lizard-like. One by one, a leader emerges, coaxing the rest into repeating increasingly elegant balletic movements, as though they are re-learning their humanity through the dance.
At first, this struck me as irritating, mainly because the formalism of ballet–particularly abstract, non-narrative ballet–is itself fairly robotic. But half to two-thirds of the way through the piece, I started to get the impression that this was Elo’s point. As an education, the movement fails as the characters become interested in one another. After touching, one loses track of what he’s doing and begins trying to touch another, to her irritation. He’s forced back into the inhuman fold, repeating supposedly meaningful, but in reality empty, gestures.
Two of the last movements in the piece end with a long, still embrace, which seems like it should be compelling, if not tragic. Conceptually it should be profound, a dance piece that supposes that stillness can be more meaningful than motion, that simple human contact is more emotive than art. But somehow it fails to transmit. I wondered if perhaps Elo’s ballet-centric choreography wasn’t a bit too demanding for the more versatile but less specialized Hubbard Street dancers.
Or maybe my entire interpretation is off-base. Whatever the case, while HSDC demonstrated a lot of talent in both the quality of the dancers and in the choreography, by and large it felt as though, to paraphrase my guest from Friday, they had trouble balancing what they were doing.