For Hubbard Street Dance, Three is a Magic Number

By Sid Smith, Chicago Tribune

Mar. 23–Hubbard Street Dance Chicago opens its spring engagement Wednesday at the Harris Theater, and a trio of works new to Chicago is on the bill.

The three choreographers represent different backgrounds, different aesthetics and different approaches to their work. Here’s a glimpse at them:

“When I was a kid, I used to hide in the bathroom, play the cast album from ‘Hello, Dolly’ on vinyl and lip sync to it,” New York-based Doug Varone confesses. “I always thought I’d wind up in musical theater.”

Growing up in Syosset, N.Y., Varone found dance while watching his sister in class. “First I took tap, but when I went to Purchase College, I studied contemporary dance for the first time, and it flipped my world. I suddenly learned you could say things with movement and not just entertain.”

After dancing with Lar Lubovitch’s troupe, Varone, 50, ventured off on his own to emerge as one of the most dependable and important American choreographers of the past two decades. Not easy to pigeonhole, he’s the creator of a large body of works for the dance concert hall but has dabbled in opera, theater, television and even fashion too.

When told such versatility makes him sound Mark Morris-like, he quips: “I’ve been around longer. You should say Mark is Doug Varone-like.” Seriously, he says, “I view myself as a good director, and you need to be if you take images and want to make sense of them.”

Plans include staging Charles Gounod’s “Faust” at the Minnesota Opera in Minneapolis. “I’m viewing it structurally as dance,” he says.

“The Constant Shift of Pulse,” his new work for Hubbard, is set to John Adams’ “Hallelujah Junction.”

“It’s an amazing score that seems to deconstruct itself by the end,” Varone says. “I love that. Whenever I make a work to an existing score, I try to visualize it, to find a vocabulary for it. This work felt earthy, scrappy. I’m drawn to the sense of the pedestrian in how we move. Like in the movies, when Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly are simply walking, and then suddenly they slide into these amazing dances and you believe it just happens naturally. I want works to look deceptively simple when they’re actually difficult.”

Juxtapositions add layer Lucas Crandall, 46, has been creating dances since he was 16 and crafted what he calls “small things” for his stepmother’s troupe. During a long career as a dancer, mostly in Europe, he befriended Jim Vincent, who later, when named Hubbard’s artistic director, invited Crandall to join his team. Crandall’s role as artistic associate is a demanding job, but Crandall unveils “The Set,” his third work for the troupe, during this engagement. “Choreography is a big release,” the Madison, Wis., native says. “My usual job here is much more stressful.”

In the studio, the mission to find utterly original movement is challenging, akin to a Holy Grail. “When I choreographed ‘Atelier’ [his first Hubbard piece], I remember walking through a museum in Paris, wondering how a statue would move if it could. This great mass of material. How would that work in motion?

“Instead of seeing yourself as a choreographer, I find it’s helpful to ask, ‘Are you a poet in this piece? A writer? A sculptor?’ ” he continues.

“I think I have my style, my way, but I make it more mine by approaching it as a poet or a writer.”

“The Set,” for three dancers, is performed to the andante movement from Bach’s Violin Concerto in A Minor, chosen by the work’s sponsors — a little like dance by assignment. “Great music is great music,” he says. “When I put it with the dance, I want it to serve as another layer. I don’t want to be dictated to by the music. I like juxtapositions.”

He learned from the great Jiri Kylian that the key is to please yourself. “If you enjoy at least 70 or 75 percent of the piece, you probably have something that works,” he says. “Some may not like it. But you’re your own boss.”

Simplicity preferred At 27, Alejandro Cerrudo is still a dancer, a very good one, as well as a promising dancemaker. When people ask what he does, “I have trouble. I don’t know which to pick and tell them,” Cerrudo said.

Born in Madrid, he danced in Europe before joining Hubbard three years ago.

He dabbled in choreography earlier, but Hubbard commissioned his first full professional piece, the wondrous “Lickety-Split,” in 2006, and he’s already on board to follow this current premiere, “Extremely Close,” with a third work for Hubbard next season.

In the studio recently, he talks softly to a trio of women who are part of the new dance, about how to stretch their arms above their heads. “I was telling them to give me something we don’t always see,” he explained later. “The magic. You can stand and not convey anything. Or you can be focused, as if in your own bubble. It’s subtle. You see it for a few moments, and then it goes away.

“You have to think of how things work and why they work,” he adds of his approach. “And why they don’t. Just because it’s complicated doesn’t mean it works better than when it’s simple. Most of the time, it’s better when it’s simple. We all like to see dancers move, but sometimes it’s striking when someone stops and stands completely still.”

How does he come up with original movement, different from other choreographers whose works he dances?

“It’s very hard,” he says. “You’re always influenced by everything you’ve touched, seen or smelled. All those people I’ve met are in me, they impact me. I was visiting my twin brother, Raoul, in Australia, and he told me proudly one day he’d just thought of a great new dance. As he described it, I stopped him and said, ‘Raoul, I told you about that dance last week. It’s by Ohad Naharin.’

“We do things and don’t always know where they come from,” he adds. “Not all inspiration comes from deep inside you.”

He loves the surprise factor. “Dance is not always pretty, but dance doesn’t have to be pretty. You need ugliness to understand beauty. I have ideas in my head when I come to the studio, but I don’t like to limit myself to my own ideas. Sometimes I see something not working that I thought in my head was perfect. You have to judge not what’s in your head, but what’s in front of your eyes.”

sismith@tribune.com

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