Hubbard Street at the American Dance Festival

[aurora]

Anyone else read Macaulay's review of the program by the Hubbard Street Dance Chicago?

Cruel but funny.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/30/arts/dan....html?ref=dance

the gem of the article is probably this:

George Balanchine once compared the use of a certain Tchaikovsky score in John Cranko’s “Onegin” to “taking a hundred-dollar bill and using it to clean yourself after you go to the bathroom.” He might have gone further about the use of the slow movements of two of Mozart’s greatest piano concertos (Nos. 23 and 21) in Jiri Kylian’s “Petite Mort” (1991), which opened the program.

The dancers look as if they’re in heat, splaying their legs to face either us or their partners, always emphasizing the groin and frequently bringing it into emphatic contact with one or another part of their partners’ anatomy.

Did anyone see Hubbard Street? Did the program indeed consist primarily (not just in Kylian's piece) of groin touching? that's the impression I get from the review ;)

[bart]

Aurora, your question(s) made me curious, especially since I couldn't remember this from several performance viewings long ago.

I went to UTube to check the Nederlands Dans Theater version, which features dancers minimally dressed as to appear almost naked. They look more more like androids, identically lean, mesomorphic -- and hardly sexual. I knew that Hubbard Street dancers are not like that.

Luckily, there's also a 34 second snippet from Hubbard Street, showing real human beings -- rendered more muscular, almost beefy, by the lighting -- dancing a great deal more strenuously than the NDT dancers.

I can see Macaulay's getting a theme of "sexiness" from this. But groin-fixation? It's an odd thing to focus on. (On the plus side, I love his tribute to Tharp's "Baker's Dozen.")

[kfw]

I've begun a new thread for further discussion of the Hubbard Street Company and its performance in Durham, and have moved previous posts on the MacCauley thread here.