The lights go up on two dancers, each isolated in a zone of light. As the two trade moves and trade places, recognizable elements keep recurring: the side-to-side head isolations of Indian dance, a duck walk from vogueing, a hip-hop crotch grab. The ingredients are familiar, but the combination is novel.
Such is “A Duo,” the most exciting of three New York premieres on Hubbard Street Dance Chicago’s program at the Joyce Theater this week.
Under the leadership of Linda-Denise Fisher-Harrell since 2021, the company still seems caught in the international-style conformity that has restricted it in the past. Previous directors had been connected to Nederlands Dance Theater and beholden to its aesthetic. They tended to program the same modish choreographers as seemingly every other repertory troupe. By the evidence of this program, Fisher-Harrell has not rejected that legacy.
The bill starts with a work by the ubiquitous Ohad Naharin (the only selection not new in New York) and ends with one by the Nederlands alum Johan Inger. All the way through, what’s most entertaining feels slight. But along the way come intimations of something fresh and distinctive.
The choreographer of “A Duo” is Aszure Barton, the company’s resident artist. The opening night cast, Shota Miyoshi and Cyrie Topete, performed with sass and flair. What makes the piece work, though, is the music: tracks by the Catalan musician Marina Herlop that mix rhythmic syllables of the Indian Carnatic tradition with her own made-up vocalizations; it’s an ersatz sound turned original. Barton’s choreography matches every detail in the music with precision, and her own collage of borrowings and personal eccentricities becomes persuasive.
The Naharin selection is a vintage one, “Black Milk” from 1990. It’s a primitivist ritual set to the driving yet circling marimba loops of Paul Smadbeck. Five men, shirtless in culottes, mark themselves with a dark, muddy liquid from a bucket, then process in a bouncy march or leap up and out in closely overlapping order. The work has a master choreographer’s clarity but not yet a unique voice.
“Into Being,” the wispiest of the premieres, is by Alice Klock and Florian Lochner, a choreographic duo that came together as members of Hubbard Street and now goes by the name Flock. Their style involves non-gendered partnering and cat’s cradle formations based on an end-over-end tumbling that can resemble, in blurred approximation, capoeira or contact improvisations. Flock seems to be after a gentle flow, but the result is an energy that doesn’t make it through the body and out; everything ends up limp.
No such problem troubles Inger’s “Impasse,” a high-energy, crowd-pleasing closer. Inger’s scenic design begins with a house outlined in tubes of light. From the house’s door emerges Simone Stevens, an ingenuous country girl greeting the day. Two pals join and mirror her in cavorting, but then people of a different sort slink out from the door: confident cool kids dressed in fashionable black.
The cool kids, ferociously led by Topete, impose their style and install a smaller house in front of the first. From that house spills a showgirl, a lounge singer, Max from “Where the Wild Things Are” and a sad-scary clown. All join in on the antics, playing chicken with dancers seated on other dancers’ shoulders or everyone doing a pony step together.
Inger is clever with trick moves, as when the original three dancers get into a linear loop, two swinging the third by a leg before the third gets back in line to swing the next. Tracks by the Lebanese-French trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf support Inger’s escalating structure with another eclectic mix: now Balkan, now Levantine, now Latin.
Inger’s message, pitting the perils of peer pressure against the power of community, is spelled out all too clearly in a program note as well as acted out onstage. But the self-pleased, knowingly manipulative tone — Topete repeatedly poking her head out of the door and yelling “Wait!” — is itself an impasse. It kept me at a remove from full enjoyment.
Giving their all to Inger’s synthetic style, the Hubbard Street dancers look like kids playing dress up, not entirely at home. For a super-skilled company that I hope is growing out of its old conforming ways, that slight disconnect could be a good sign.
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