LEAPING INTO FALL
If dance can define, this recital was its own dynamic dictionary: Running through this weekend, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago’s 39 Fall Series is a celebration in steps. At its heart are two justly popular world premieres: Turning the transience of dance into enduring, grateful memories, the pieces instantly justified the hours of hard work that yield every minute of performance.
For many in the Harris Theatre the program’s peak arrived at the end: the debut of Alejandro Cerrudo’s sublime and serene Niebla (or “fog”), the 15th original work from this prolific resident choreographer (known for his One Thousand Pieces and Little mortal jump). Niebla is the kind of new creation whose effects and impact on the audience—mostly awestruck astonishment at the rightness of everything you see—is as crucial as the ingredients that make the choreography.
Against the auras of Michael Korsh’s astonishing lighting effects (inverted and regular pyramids shimmering with smoke), we get a ravishingly intimate combination of strategic silences varied with a musical backdrop by Bach, Liszt and Schubert. The galvanic work features dramatically shifting frames that focus the action like collaborating cameras. Fragmented, seemingly isolated, gestures seem to beseech a response. Duets pose questions in the air, followed by flawless group cohesion: A troupe become a form-fitting assemblage moving as one collective impulse.
The second world premiere: Brian Brooks compares his new and organic work Terrain to a flock of birds “with a cohesiveness balancing order and chaos.” No question, the 17 dancers, all in variations of white, do a lot of nestling, undulating and collapsing to a pulsating score by Todd Reynolds and Terry Riley. Filled with tandem movements that aren’t quite synced in interchangeability (making them all the more enthralling) or pacing into processions, Brooks’s cunning fluidity proves more moving than lockstep uniformity ever could. With no gender-driven distinctions among the movements, this “terrain” became the rapport of ensemble.
In his Hubbard Street advent Brooks knows how to turn seemingly unrelated moves into cumulative tension, resistance bending into compliance. At times furtive, then suddenly forceful, the parts enlarge the whole with a spontaneity that seems improvised until you see the larger patterns that contain and explain the individual twists and turns.
Two popular and interrelated works by Czech-born, Holland-based Jiří Kylián complete the night. His 1989 Falling Angels remains a showcase for eight women, frenetically danced to Steve Reich’s driving beats. Filled with frozen or hesitant, then increasingly frantic, rushes, runs and reversals, the “angels” seem caught up in embryonic patterns that never quite cohere, adding even more flight and fright to their freefall plummets.
Even more anguished, Kylián’s 1990 work Sarabande uses dangling 18th-century ball gowns as hanging props to seemingly terrorize six male dancers. They erupt, writhing and screaming, their hands and fingers outstretched–until they begin preening and shimmying as if absorbing the femininity of the hovering costumes.
After the dresses lift out of sight, Bach’s second partita for solo violin (electronically arranged by Dick Heuff) seems to calm the crisis. Kylián’s intention, it seems, is to offer a depiction of “psychological states” experienced during a lifetime. A lofty goal that seems to work: It’s as if all the motions of a single life were sped up to see just what mattered and what was merely movement.
All in all, the Fall Series rises beautifully to four occasions.
photos by Todd Rosenberg
Hubbard Street Dance Chicago
Season 38 Fall Series
Harris Theater for Music and Dance
Millennium Park, 205 East Randolph St
ends on November 20, 2016
for tickets, call 312-850-9744 or visit Hubbard
for more shows, visit Theatre in Chicago
