Hubbard Street Dance Chicago Review
March 28, 2025 | The Joyce Theater – New York, NY, USA
Hubbard Street Dance Chicago’s eclectic repertory at The Joyce Theater spoke unmistakably on some human issues of our time. Although the dancing was top-notch, the experience was ultimately a bleak reminder of our current reality without resolve.
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Hubbard Street Dance Chicago Review
Black Milk, a quintet choreographed by Ohad Naharin in 1990, investigates the experience of being ostracized from a group.
Fading in from downstage right, a sculpturesque man (danced by David Schultz), walks himself around bare chested to the beat of Paul Smadbeck’s marimba chords. Four men upstage, pull and lean back and forth, wearing beige pant-skirts, ritualistically carrying a silver bucket over their heads.
They locomote diagonally, setting the pail down, taking turns to cleanse themselves with the mud inside. Shortly after they smear their faces with it, Schultz follows suit to wipe the grainy substance onto himself.
With cultish athleticism, the men toss and suspend in barrel turns, flock around, bounce into grand jetés, show off canons of leans, feast for air, breakdance on the floor, and then flip into stillness.
Schultz returns to the bucket, but this time he smears himself like a madman. The group tries to tranquilize him but he escapes. A raw start to the evening.
Almost no one left their seats for intermission before we transitioned to Into Being (2024), a piece I favorably relished, exploring how to form lasting relationships.
Choreographed by two Hubbard alumni, Alice Klock and Florian Lochner (aka, FLOCK), the piece is drenched in an earthy-toned aesthetic where the dancers try to make spatial discoveries together.
There is a tender moment of a woman (danced by Simone Stevens) pressing her elbows down against a man’s shoulders, jolting one of her elbows sideways. The man (Aaron Choate) runs off stage like it’s a breakup, replaced by a lady (Bianca Melidor) who dances movements rooted in African dance.
Melidor gestures the crowning of herself, fingers spiking to the sky, rolling her torso, kneeling on the floor with arms stretched out like wings. Her contours splay on the floor in the shape of an “X”, and the other dancers perform obsessive over-the-shoulder rolls and illusions.
Through pulls, extensions and unraveling of swirls, the quintet ebbs and flows between interconnections, untying themselves, then tetris back into plush togetherness.
An inward grand battement cuts off the flow, ending with an intertwined canon of barrel turns.
A Duo (2024), a quirky energetic dance choreographed by Aszure Barton, expresses the amalgamation of human dynamics blending dance styles and gender-norms, and showcasing an array of physical possibilities.
The spine-tingling piece starts in silence, featuring two androgynously dressed dancers (Shota Miyoshi and Cyrie Topete), almost crab walking upstage. The two, heels tapping to every rhythm of Marina Herlop’s electronica, flaunt a battement here and there, cartoonishly sprinkling in some hip-hop popping and locking, also animating a Michael Jackson signature crotch grab
Not leaving out the elements of capoeira which are infused with some classical Indian dance, the couple dances like Japanese pinball machines.
Topete domineered the duet altogether. She busts her chops like none other – frankly, a little intimidating to watch – using dance as her weapon, clearly moving in a category of her own.
Some sexy creative floor partnering precedes the ending, the duo melting into their splits as they collapse.
And finally, IMPASSE (2020) choreographed by Johan Inger, who is also the set designer, illustrates how societal pressures can contribute to the loss of oneself, forcing the kind-hearted to escape multitudes of antics.
Stevens returns as a happy youth bourreé-ing on her knees in a minty dress to Amos Ben-Tal and Ibrahim Magadan’s piano. Situated upstage, we see a cutout in the shape of a house with lights glowing around its perimeter.
Two lads (Schultz and Jack Henderson) wearing colored tops come out and join Stevens. The trio prances across the carefree diagonal and promenades in peace. Fades in Latin jazz and a girl, danced by the powerful Topete once again, seducing the trio wearing sleek black attire. More dancers in black overpower the trio and perform flashy tango, salsa and swing moves.
Topete, with bullish moxie, reenters with a smaller house cutout, and gradually screams at the audience: “Wait!”.
The dance gets raunchy when a showgirl, a clown in a suit, a wannabe king and queen, a pimp, and a pregnant fashionista jam on.
Topete’s character starts to dry hump the clown on the floor, someone does a walkover, and at center stage, the group gathers to throw a girl up and down, hollering.
The ensemble pounds their own chests with more disarrayed dancing, then suddenly everyone freezes; except Stevens, who walks around silently, looking on at a world that has stopped functioning normally.
Everyone trots from side to side as the velvet curtain creeps down, reminding me of a fish bowl slowly being drained.
Stevens and her two friends escape, holding a tiny cutout of the original house in bewilderment, ditching the kooky society behind them for good.
Watching dance that validates one’s feelings has tremendous social value. And Hubbard Street’s elixir of contemporary dance this evening brought the house down alright.
However, the chaotic innovations also regurgitated the real-world issues that haunt us, with no hope in sight, leaving me feeling more stressed from before the call time.
The trend nowadays is to use dance as a politically-charged vehicle to voice social concerns. But good art can only speak to the heart when it is communicated without the screams.
Featured Photo of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago‘s Michele Dooley, Jacqueline Burnett, and Aaron Choate in Into Being by FLOCK. Photo by Michelle Reid.
