LAR LUBOVITCH DANCE COMPANY
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Lar Lubovitch creates incredibly graceful choreography. His dancers glide across the stage like ice skaters–as if they no longer recognized gravity, or as if the natural friction between feet and floor no longer existed. His dances are so well balanced and elegant it seems almost impossible to criticize them. On the other hand, they’re so emotionally shallow they’re almost silly. Somehow, despite Lubovitch’s skill as a choreographer, his concert at the Shubert felt like an annoying cross between Hee Haw and the Ice Capades. It’s almost as if Lubovitch puts a plastic slipcover over his dances because they’re so pretty he doesn’t want to dirty them with real emotion.
So in Love, Lubovitch’s most recent dance, bounces through four Cole Porter tunes sung by contemporary icons Tom Waits, the Neville Brothers, Annie Lennox, and K.D. Lang. The first dance, “It’s All Right With Me,” is a solo for an angry, tough woman who flings her long brown hair and claws at the sky. But Lubovitch can’t avoid being smooth and light (or should it be “lite”?) in his choreography. Despite some assistance from Waits’s hard-edged, raspy voice, this dance comes off as artificially angry, and the final moment when the dancer flicks some imaginary guy the bird seems hollow.
