HUBBARD STREET DANCE COMPANY
Which is what makes it so odd to see them doing Daniel Ezralow’s Super Straight Is Coming Down. This dance, created for Hubbard Street, is one of two Chicago premieres that the company is presenting this spring at the Civic Center, and it’s subversive. It’s a slap in the audience’s face–and a breath of fresh air. The original music, by Tom Willens, booms and squeaks and is silent at odd times. The choreography is sometimes alienated and expressionless, at other times violent. Super Straight has a generally unfinished feel: the dancing is necessarily a little rough-and-tumble because it’s so close to the ground. and the piece as a whole seems an open-ended meditation on a subject that’s never specified (unlike Lynne Taylor-Corbett’s Appearances, also on the program, which sets out to confuse sex roles and does so relentlessly).
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As Super Straight opens, the five dancers (Alberto Arias, Frank Chaves, Sandi Cooksey, Ron De Jesus, and Lynn Sheppard) can be dimly seen upstage. Then onstage spotlights, one behind each dancer, come up slowly to reveal that they’re standing in clear plastic bags. Are these crime victims encased in body bags? We can see their 50s-style clothes–suits for the three men, a prim blouse and skirt for one woman, an off-the-shoulder black dress for the other: are these people freeze-dried specimens from that earlier era, which so resembles our own? One by one they emerge from their bags, dropping them in front of the lights like transparent snakes’ skins sloughed off–icy sculptures that set the tone for what follows.
Rasa, the other premiere, is more in the typical Hubbard Street vein–much more vertical, much more jazzy–which is not surprising since choreographer Ron De Jesus has been a Hubbard Street dancer for four years. This ambitious three-section work for seven dancers (Arias, Chaves, De Jesus, Shannon Mitchell, Daniela Panessa, Josef Patrick, and Sheppard) has an East-meets-West theme. The first two musical selections are by Ravi Shankar, the third by Shakti playing with John McLaughlin. The costumes, designed by De Jesus, blend East and West: the three women wear gold spangled unitards, while the men luxuriate in black pantaloons with gold bands and black leather harnesses for their bare torsos.
