HUBBARD STREET DANCE COMPANY
Lou Conte, who has directed Hubbard Street Dance Company for all of its 12 years, understands this. His achievement is to consistently make or choose dances that have this mystery yet remain accessible. The accessibility can come from something as straightforward as a familiar look, as in Conte’s The 40’s, which draws on popular dances of that period. Or it can have a more mysterious source: an unimpeachable expertise. For whatever reason, just the right lighting, the right costumes, and most important, the right dancing can make an audience feel that, though they may not know what they’ve seen, by God they know they’ve seen something, and will come back for more.
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During Hubbard Street’s Civic Center engagement this year, no dance was more ineffable and more appealing than Daniel Ezralow’s Read My Hips. It’s a serious work, obscurely critical and ironic, and loads of fun. The choreography shows traces of folk dance and of rock dancing, but all of it’s big, and much of it’s funny. The score, by Michel Colombier, is eclectic, but its most consistent pulse is a rock beat. Howell Binkley’s lighting is superb, from its initial evocation of explosions–fireworks? bombs?–to a murky overhead wash, to another, warmer overhead effect that brings out the dancers’ flesh–the curves of cheeks and chests, the exact musculature of the upper arms.
This level look at professional wrestling is both disarmingly ingenuous and cynically witty. Ezralow’s sense of humor pops up elsewhere in Read My Hips. The dancers form a standing knot, for example, and twiddle their feet to move evenly and quite rapidly across the stage, depositing first one, then another dancer in angular poses, their heads touching the floor. They’re like pieces of lint that have been dropped by a human dust ball–that later picks them up again.
The dancers’ brilliant rhythmic sense in Step Out of Love is typical of Hubbard Street. The other works on the program–Line Drive, excerpts from Rose From the Blues, and Shakti–were all enlivened by that same instinctual, driven, and disciplined sense of rhythm. Hubbard Street’s stable of talented choreographers may provide the vocabulary and syntax, but the dancers supply the punctuation–and their choices are inspired.
