It’s never easy for a touring dance company to imprint its identity on audiences with just one program. Appearing in the Bank of Celebrity Series’s Dance Series at the Shubert Theatre last weekend, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago demonstrated energy and ensemble in three works — Marguerite Donlan’s Strokes Through the Tail (2005), William Forsythe’s Enemy in the Figure (1989), and Nacho Duato’s Gnawa (2005) — but the identity remained elusive.
Enemy in the Figure was scheduled to lead off, but on Sunday, at least, it was moved to the second slot, following Strokes Through the Tail and its eight-minute coda, Julian Barnett’s 2003 duo Float. Irish choreographer Donlan’s work is set to the minuet, andante, and finale (in that order) of Mozart’s Symphony No. 40; the title, she says, came from her reading that “Mozart always wrote single semiquavers, demisemiquavers etc. with strokes through the tail.” The idea is that the dancers “move as demi and semiquavers personifying the notes’ pattern on the page and emphasizing the humor in Mozart’s music.” What we got was an enjoyable goof whose literalism could have been a Mark Morris parody, or a riff on Jirí Kylián’s Symphony in D. Erin Derstine, in white (bridal?) tulle, has her quintet of five formal-suited (sans tie or shirt) men on the run for a while, poking her head into their chests and pushing them off stage. There are costume exchanges, with the tulle looking increasingly transparent, and role reversals, shoulder shimmies, silly walks, a man unable to get off stage, some tail-stroking gestures, and a predictable ending with Derstine left standing as the men fall to the floor.
Float is set to a composition called “We Have a Map of the Piano” by Gunnar Tynes and Örvar Smárason of the Icelandic pop experimental group Múm. Erin Derstine and Isaac Spencer roll on the floor, execute break moves in unison and sequence, walk arm in arm, fight over an on-stage microphone, more like siblings than lovers. It ends with Spencer at the mike trying to say “Please don’t flow so fast” while Derstine covers his mouth before finally relenting.
Enemy in the Figure is as mystifying but more rewarding. From the same period as In the Middle Somewhat Elevated, which Boston Ballet performed in 2002 and 2005, it has a similar post-industrial-strength score by Thom Willems. It revolves around a 10-foot-high wavy wall that stands center stage and blocks our view of what’s going down behind it. Other features include a light box that, trundled about, provides most of what little illumination is afforded and a cable that’s snaked violently and repeatedly. The curtain rises on a woman in a white leotard writhing on the floor in some combination of sex and birth. What follows, often at the edges of the stage and barely visible, is acrobatic, athletic, sometimes playful, sometimes angry, sometimes just plain brutal, costumed in various combinations of black and white that include fishnet tights over a white leotard. At 30 minutes, it could reward many viewings. Then again, less might be more.
Gnawa takes its name from a black Muslim people of Morocco and their music. Like Strokes Through the Tail, it’s a Hubbard commission, communal where Enemy in the Figure is tribal. A set of three couples, women in black flowing dresses, men bare-chested in white pants, mutates into six and then seven; they’re permeated by a gray-clad couple. The three-part structure is concerto-like, with the couple dancing a slow solo section before the group return, candles in hand, for a final set of variations from which the couple emerge, the man holding the woman upside down. Typical of Duato’s style, the movement conjures seagulls and other birds and perhaps animals God never thought to create. I wondered how it might have looked on Duato’s own Madrid-based Compañía Nacional de Danza, whose members would have given it a more organic flow.
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