Once again Hubbard Street Dance Chicago is holding court at The Joyce Theater in New York City. This astonishingly gifted company grew out of the Lou Conte Dance Studio when in 1977 Conte gathered together an ensemble of four gifted dancers to perform community service at senior centers across Chicago.
Conte’s studio was located at LaSalle and Hubbard streets, ergo the unlikely name for a group that has since catapulted itself into a company renowned worldwide for its creativity, diversity, and downright grit.
The pre-recorded music used gives the company a range of options and flexibility difficult to achieve with a live performance and ranks center stage with the choreography, the ne plus ultra dancers, the set designs, and the dramatic lighting. Altogether, they make up a not-to-be-missed, exuberant experience. This season includes a two week engagement at The Joyce Theater located at 175 Eighth Avenue, New York City.
Each week features a different program. This review covers the first week, which consists of three dances. The first, GNAWA (pronounced Nawa with a silent G), was choreographed by the enormously talented Nacho Duato to the music of Ma’Bud Allah by Hassan Hakmoun and Adam Rudolph.
Gnawa is the name of a Moroccan ethnic and cultural sect that consists of the descendants of peoples brought from West Africa during the 15th and 16th centuries as slaves. They have their own spiritual and religious practices that are expressed through music, giving a unique mystical and spiritual ethos to the sounds that can be used to facilitate healing trances.
Duato has used this captivating music to create a blending of movement to sound that is riveting. The dancers and music are one, each seeming to stimulate and expand through the other. Duato has captured the soul in the music, making his dancer’s body’s move in impossible configurations to achieve a quintessential whole.
The lighting by Nicolas Fischtel added to the dramatic staging by Jim Vincent aided by Cheryl Mann to create a magical experience. This is a world-class dance that should be seen by everyone searching for what’s possible though the collaboration of sound and movement.
The second piece switched tempo from the overwhelming emotion of Gnawa and brought a calming effect to the audience, which was still buzzing from the final cords of the music of the first piece. SWEET GWEN SUITE is a positive delight and a long-time favorite of aficionados of dance.
It was choreographed by everyone’s beloved Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon with music by Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass, Johnny Mandel, and Lalo Schifrin. The piece is beautifully interpreted by an alternating cast of three. Our performance was executed by the charming Alexandria Best, flanked by Dominick Brown and Aaron Choate, and accented by lighting designer Harrison Pearse-Pollack.
In this piece, lighting contributed to the dramatic focus on Best, which she exploited to the max with witty, flamboyant, and sexy nuances of this well-known dance. Costumes by Bobby Pearce created a Spanish Flamenco edge to the piece, giving a new look and opportunity for enhanced expressive activity, which Best gave her best (so to speak) to achieve.
Best was center stage, while her tall, pseudo-gaucho-costumed, well-matched, inspired dancers Choate and Brown, made the pas de trois a perfect threesome.
After a brief intermission, the Company performed a piece by Aszure Barton entitled BLUE SOUP, as an homage to the name her mother gave her at birth. Costume designer Remi van Bochove created a series of costumes after Fritz Masten in incandescent blue, making the gathered ensemble indeed look like blue soup.
Barton is a renowned creator of dance worldwide, and her credentials include collaborations with almost every celebrity known to the world of dance. Blue Soup is mostly a group ensemble effort with the entire company interacting a good deal of the time with only intermittent spaces for solo and duet groupings.
Integrating the well-known voices of Maya Angelou, Randy Newman, Paul Simon, and Andy Williams (to name a few) added to the fullness of the performance and gave giving another “voice” to the activity moving in radiant blue sync on the stage. Blue Soup was the first large-scale work Aszure created in the early 2000s. Now, this performance 20 years later gives rise to its long-lasting relevance.
If you don’t yet have tickets for week two’s performance, I suggest you do yourself a favor right now and reach out to The Joyce Theater for ticket availability.
Barbara Angelakis is one of the founders of LuxuryWeb Magazine, and she is its Senior Travel Writer. She travels the four corners of the world with a thirst for knowledge and a twinkle in her eye, seeking out the history of people and places and sharing her experiences. She specializes in culture and history along with luxury destinations, hotels/resorts/cruises/spas, and most recently Jewish Heritage, exploring the historical connection between Jews and their host countries. She has been recognized for outstanding coverage as “Journalist of the Year” by the Tanzania Tourist Board and is the recipient of the MTA Malta Tourism Press Award, the first American to receive this honor. For the past 25 years, Barbara has written extensively for LuxuryWeb Magazine, and her work can also be found at The Jerusalem Post, Jewish Link, Epoch Times,and Vision Times.
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