March 14, 2014
by Hedy Weiss

It was the two pieces that followed, performed in quick and magical succession — “Sarabande,” for six men (to the music of Bach, electronically arranged by Dick Heuff), and “Falling Angels,” for eight women (to Steve Reich’s “Drumming,” given a fabulous live performance by Third Coast Percussion) — that fully blew the roof off the Harris.

Assembling a program devoted entirely to the works of a single choreographer can be a risky business — unless the choreographer in the spotlight happens to be a genius. Hubbard Street Dance Chicago tapped just such an artist.

The breathtaking pieces in its “Four Works by Jiri Kylian” program — a celebration of the Czech-born choreographer who spent most of his creative life with the innovative Nederlands Dans Theater — certainly bears the imprint of certain obsessions (the male and female psyches, the dynamics of relationships), movement language (intricate, precise, jagged, intensely musical) and overall aesthetic preferences (minimal but highly theatrical). But each piece also is startlingly different, particularly in Kylian’s choice of music and elements of design. And the Hubbard Street dancers (coached by artistic director Glenn Edgerton, Urtzi Aranburu and Roslyn Anderson) are nothing short of sublime.

Opening the program, which runs through Sunday at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance, was “27’52”” (the title denotes the running time), in which three couples — the notably stunning Anna Lopez and Garrett Patrick Anderson, Meredith Dincolo and Jesse Bechard, and Kellie Epperheimer and Kevin J. Shannon — engage in a series of complex, sometimes disturbing duets about male-female exploration, manipulation, exploitation, adoration and combat. Crucial to the dynamic is Dirk Haubrich’s manipulated electronic score (with its strange, startling, percussive sequences), interspersed with text spoken in several languages. Covering the stage floor for this piece are strips of white matting that at various moments are turned into moving platforms or cavelike blankets.

“Petite Mort,” set to seductive piano music by Mozart, has been something of a signature piece for the company since 2000. A look at male-female roles, it begins in silence, as six men whip their fencing foils through the air. They might well be soldiers home from war, and when six women emerge in creamy corsets and bare legs, the erotic games begin. This is a very sexy piece, and a comic one, too, as the women later glide across the stage mostly hidden behind great courtly gowns on wheels that suggests the difference between private and public behavior.

It was the two pieces that followed, performed in quick and magical succession — “Sarabande,” for six men (to the music of Bach, electronically arranged by Dick Heuff), and “Falling Angels,” for eight women (to Steve Reich’s “Drumming,” given a fabulous live performance by Third Coast Percussion) — that fully blew the roof off the Harris.

“Sarabande” might just be the most psychologically revealing evocation of male sexuality (in all its primal insanity, compulsion and comedy) to be devised in dance. During part of it, the six men literally move underneath the skirts of six elaborate, queenly gowns suspended from the rafters. But the centerpiece here is an astonishing solo — brilliantly danced by David Schultz — that probes the drives of the male mind and body in the most revealing ways. Andrew Murdock, Jason Hortin, Johnny McMillan, Jonathan Fredrickson and Anderson were Schultz’s fellow travelers into Freudian places.

In “Falling Angels,” the powerhouse women (Jessica Tong, Bryna Pascoe, Jacqueline Burnett, Alice Klock, Emilie Leriche, Dincolo, Epperheimer and Lopez) become the highly individualistic members of a “tribe,” moving to Reich’s music in ways that are archaic, a bit African and both fearsome and lyrical.

Read the original article here.

« Previous post: Ticket: classical music

Next post: ‘Wild Sound’ human, organic »