HUBBARD STREET DANCE COMPANY
Conte decided charm and glamour weren’t enough: he wanted Hubbard Street to include ballet and modern idioms as well as the company’s signature jazz. He announced that the company would soon be dancing more new works commissioned from outside choreographers, works created to challenge and stimulate rather than showcase and exploit.
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Step Out of Love, its companion piece, is even more of a departure for the company. The movement is densely layered, so intricate its structure is difficult to perceive. Step Out begins in smoky dimness with five women–Bataille, Sandi Cooksey, Farley, Sheppard, and Stevens–scattered about the stage in various leaden attitudes, some sitting on Lucite folding chairs, some sprawling on the floor. The movement is spare and eccentric, equally detached from the ballet, jazz, and traditional modern vocabularies: a leg stutters and twitches; one dancer jerks and flops to the floor; another nibbles and worries her nail. In the extended first section of Step Out, the choreography establishes its key movements–a stroking of the inner thighs, an odd backwards scrabble on hands and feet, a slap of the palm, a back roll–in a series of overlapping, unrelated solos.
