HUBBARD STREET DANCE COMPANY
With its hotshot lighting and explosive score, Ezralow’s Read My Hips (1990) is a good opener–it’s like walking into a party and having real fireworks go off. But the dance doesn’t hold up well after a couple of viewings: its sections are utterly distinct emotionally and, as far as I can tell, thematically–they’re stitched together with sight gags, joke entrances and exits, and crazy sound and lighting effects. It’s a gag dance, with plenty of good one-liners but no direction.
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Worse, on this program Read My Hips seemed sterile and impersonal, the kind of dance that could be performed by any competent company of a dozen or so. Part of that sterility is that deadpan performance style: in Ezralow’s conception, dance doesn’t seem to be something people do, it’s something that just happens to them. Furthermore, the choreography isolates the dancers from each other. With the exceptions of a wrestlers’ duet for two men–which is still gut wrenching to watch–and a section where dancers ride on each other’s backs, the dancers rarely touch or engage each other in any way other than the occasional glare. Read My Hips is a dance for its time–and only for its time. If it’s around in ten years, it’ll be as an artifact of the anomic 80s.
The dancing is soft, the partnering considerate. Dancers may slide down each other’s backs and legs, may grab each other’s ankles or shoulders; but no one who’s picked up is ever put down other than carefully (note the many times in Ezralow’s choreography that partners are simply dropped–for comic effect). Sometimes the partners in Baker’s Dozen fit together as snugly as the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle; and because the roles were originally tailored to the sizes, shapes, and personalities of Tharp’s company, it must have been difficult for the Hubbard Street dancers to step into them. But the dance is clearly about shifting partners–about new juxtapositions of noses and knees, new ways for cheeks to fit into the hollows of necks–and to that extent it can’t be much more difficult a fit today than it was to Tharp’s company in 1979.
At least the dancers have faces in Diary–as they do in all the other dances here except Read My Hips. Personality may be Hubbard Street’s long suit, the composite personality of people handpicked both to fit in and to be themselves. That personality is something artistic director Lou Conte has labored to perfect; it’s something Tharp covets. And it’s something not easily replaced. This is Hilsabeck’s last Hubbard Street engagement in Chicago, and when she’s gone from Conte’s The 40’s, who will Geoff Myers toss so lightly to the rafters? The dancers are what transform the cookie-cutter costumes and unison choreography of The 40’s–the dancers and Conte’s nostalgia for gentle good humor, which he also shares with Tharp.
