Dance: Hubbard
Oct. 18th, 2013 12:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fabrisseEarlier on the day I got my diagnosis, I bought season tickets for this year's contemporary dance season at the Kennedy Center. My first ticket was in mid-September, but I was still recovering from the surgery and there were horrible thunderstorms, so I made the decision to miss it. Based on the review in The Washington Post the next day, it was probably wise. People left early because the work was so bleak.
Hubbard Street Dance is a small company which presented four pieces. None of the music, with the exception of the shortest piece, was particularly memorable. The dancers were marvelous, but the choreographic vocabulary seemed very limited for the first two pieces (Little mortal jump and Fluence). In fact, for these two, the stage was grey, the floor was grey, and the costumes were grey. There were some interesting visual effects in the first one -- a soloist leaping forward and disappearing over the edge of the stage as another dancer leapt up onto a wall at the back of the stage created the illusion of continuous movement, for instance. There was a pas-de-deux that began with the dancers being stuck to velcro walls, too.
Fluence explored romance including a male/male pas-de-deux that was gentle and touching.
The third piece, PACOPEPELUTO, a seven minute series of solos (with a couple of peek-in moments from the other soloists), used flesh-toned (and, yes, I mean toned to the color of the dancer's skin) dance belts as the only costumes which surprised the teenagers to my right. They thought they were seeing nudity at first and were very titillated. The music for this one was 50s pop songs sung by Dean Martin.
All of the pieces had a great deal of energy; the series of solos was witty and fun.
The final piece, Casi-Casa, was originally choreographed for a group in Havana, Cuba. Hubbard Street, according to the program, made changes to it and added some incidental material. This piece had color in the costumes, though, with two exceptions, the colors were very subdued. The overall intent seemed to be a commentary on modern life beginning with a man watching and interacting with a television. The props were minimal, but used to good effect, especially the "vacuum cleaners" used by the women in one section. This segment combined Irish step dancing, references to Scottish sword dances, and the daily drudgery of cleaning with the implication that the women were professional cleaners.
I think it was a mistake to have the short, funny piece before this one. One segment was a pas-de-deux about a break-up. There were titters of laughter in places, and a big laugh from much of the audience when the woman opens the oven and slams down the item she's been cooking. It's a baby (a doll, of course), but she walks off and the man is left in anguish. Had the funny item not been immediately before, I think the audience would have paid more attention to the emotional tone.
I loved the dancing. The dancers moved beautifully, but I was very aware that there was only one person of color in the group, Jessica Tong, whose movement drew my eye even when she was not the intended focus.
Hubbard Street Dance is a small company which presented four pieces. None of the music, with the exception of the shortest piece, was particularly memorable. The dancers were marvelous, but the choreographic vocabulary seemed very limited for the first two pieces (Little mortal jump and Fluence). In fact, for these two, the stage was grey, the floor was grey, and the costumes were grey. There were some interesting visual effects in the first one -- a soloist leaping forward and disappearing over the edge of the stage as another dancer leapt up onto a wall at the back of the stage created the illusion of continuous movement, for instance. There was a pas-de-deux that began with the dancers being stuck to velcro walls, too.
Fluence explored romance including a male/male pas-de-deux that was gentle and touching.
The third piece, PACOPEPELUTO, a seven minute series of solos (with a couple of peek-in moments from the other soloists), used flesh-toned (and, yes, I mean toned to the color of the dancer's skin) dance belts as the only costumes which surprised the teenagers to my right. They thought they were seeing nudity at first and were very titillated. The music for this one was 50s pop songs sung by Dean Martin.
All of the pieces had a great deal of energy; the series of solos was witty and fun.
The final piece, Casi-Casa, was originally choreographed for a group in Havana, Cuba. Hubbard Street, according to the program, made changes to it and added some incidental material. This piece had color in the costumes, though, with two exceptions, the colors were very subdued. The overall intent seemed to be a commentary on modern life beginning with a man watching and interacting with a television. The props were minimal, but used to good effect, especially the "vacuum cleaners" used by the women in one section. This segment combined Irish step dancing, references to Scottish sword dances, and the daily drudgery of cleaning with the implication that the women were professional cleaners.
I think it was a mistake to have the short, funny piece before this one. One segment was a pas-de-deux about a break-up. There were titters of laughter in places, and a big laugh from much of the audience when the woman opens the oven and slams down the item she's been cooking. It's a baby (a doll, of course), but she walks off and the man is left in anguish. Had the funny item not been immediately before, I think the audience would have paid more attention to the emotional tone.
I loved the dancing. The dancers moved beautifully, but I was very aware that there was only one person of color in the group, Jessica Tong, whose movement drew my eye even when she was not the intended focus.
