Hubbard Street Dance Chicago
O’Day’s choreography suits Hubbard Street, perhaps better than it did the White Oak dancers: what I remember about their performance, despite the work’s romantic overtones, is the confrontation between four strong personalities and athletic, assertive bodies. When Hubbard Street performed it, it was gentler and made more sense psychologically: the four had their own distinct personalities but also communicated a sense of relationship.
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The piece is structured to reveal the dancers’ characters first in broad strokes, then in finer detail. First one couple (Shan Bai and Joseph Mooradian), then the other (Rhonda Henriksen and Ron De Jesus), performs a duet that begins softly and progresses to more definite and often gestural movement. At first Bai’s and Mooradian’s arms are curved and poised, skimming the air; later he throws her out to the side, holding her at the waist, and when she’s pulled up short she gives a little kick to punctuate the end of her trajectory. Henriksen and De Jesus at first look melty, unmuscled, especially Henriksen as De Jesus drops her sideways, turns her, dips her back. Later he sets her on his knee and squashes her head down into her shoulders with his hand as if pushing a clown back into a jack-in-the-box. But finally she shoves him away and then eludes him when he tries to embrace her.
It’s inevitable that choreographers and dancers together produce a kind of alchemy. Yet I have mixed feelings about the derivative nature of Quartet for IV. I’m happy to see Tharp’s lively, musical steps reinvented, transmuted, especially so expertly by choreographer and dancers alike. It may be too that HSDC, now well trained in Tharp’s movement, makes O’Day’s choreography look more Tharpian than it otherwise might. But what does O’Day have to offer of his own? This dance shows glimmers of difference from Tharp, and later works may be even more individual. I hope Hubbard Street finds out by sticking with O’Day, who’s now an independent choreographer and guest artist with New York City Ballet. Or maybe I should say I hope he sticks with Hubbard Street, because the company is gaining new repertory only slowly and painfully.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Photo/Lois Greenfield.
