HUBBARD STREET DANCE CHICAGO
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The opening tableau is stunning–the stage is draped in white cloth reminiscent of classical statues. Four of the seven dancers are completely wrapped in the same cloth and look like nightmare versions of classical statues. Two dancers, each in brightly colored but mismatched tights and leotard, step from behind statues and begin a somber duet on the dimly lit stage. (This tableau reminded my companion of the plazas in European cities in front of ruined medieval churches.) The strong design is by Ezralow himself, and all the elements work together to create a mood of delicate ruin in open spaces.
Ezralow dedicates the dance to Christopher Gillis, a former Paul Taylor dancer who died of AIDS last month, and the dance seems an elegy. A bare-chested man comes forward, and the wrapped dancers are unwrapped. The dancers form a line in which they alternately embrace or kiss the people on either side; at one moment, two men kiss. The stage goes dark and the dancers sleep while the bare-chested man undulates painfully by himself in a spotlight. The music builds to a crescendo and the dancers seem to wake as the man walks through them to a light, but then the dancers fall back into fetal positions and twitch as they sleep.
The glories of the concert were two Twyla Tharp pieces that combine nuance with kinetic excitement, as well as with intellectual content, movement invention, and wonderful senses of space and of dance history. This is the first time I’ve looked at Tharp’s dances with a critic’s eye, and I feel the way I did when I first started reading Hemingway and wanted to tell everyone what a wonderful writer he was–a discovery everyone else had already made.
