From Street to Stage (2024)

Thang Dao’s “Nevermore” (2023) began with the Edgar Allen Poe poem, in which a raven intones the title word and the poem's speaker mourns his separation from his beloved Lenore, who has died. The poem was spoken in voiceover while the bereft lover (Elliot Hammans), in a poet's billowing white shirt, danced in a distraught manner, restrained by a small number of dancers as ravens. A second story followed, also with separated lovers, also with ravens—in fact, nearly the whole company as ravens. This time the source was a folktale Cowherd and Weaving Girl, found in Vietnam and other East Asian countries. Now there was a role for a female dancer (Jacqueline Burnett, in a long red dress and drape). Together Hammans and Burnett danced, joyously united by ravens, then forcibly separated by them. (The lovers may meet only once a year, over a bridge made by ravens.) Thang Dao has spoken about his Vietnamese background and how through these two sources, both involving separated lovers andravens, he has found a way to bring together East and West. It may be that the libretto of this very emotive piece intends to fuse the stories into one, the lovers simultaneously poet and cowherd, Lenore and Weaving Girl.

The costumes for the ravens, by Calvin Tran & Neftaly Silva, were really successful. The ravens, both men and women, were clad head to toe in a black garment, unstructured beneath the shoulders, its dull black relieved by a glossy, gleaming panel down the side. Their feet were in sleek red footwear to just up above the ankles (bird claws?). Unisex, looming, frightening.

Equally effective was their creaturely movement. The arms added to a sinister effect, especially when a raven advanced towards the audience. Choreographed like wings, the arms were bent at the elbows and again at the wrists, from which the hands are acutely angled to accentuate the fingers splayed like the slats of wings. In the many lifts, usually involving two or three dancers, lift up another and the lifted raven twisted and turned as though in the air.

“Dear Frankie” (2023) is an appropriately Chicagoan piece for this Chicago company: a tribute to Frankie Knuckles, the Chicago deejay famed for introducing house music to a wider audience outside club culture, from Rennie Harris, famed for introducing street dance to the proscenium stage. (The music in this danceis by Harris's long time music collaborator, Darrin Ross.) The piece opens with a letter: “Dear Frankie,” it begins, “You changed my life.” There it is, in four words. What else do you need to know?

The stage was set up like a club, dark with some dramatic lighting and peopled with the casually dressed, some of whom stepped out to take the spontaneous solos that are a convention of improvisation. I couldn't help thinking that Harris’s ambition to take hip hop outside its street model must be as hard to realize to perfection as it is to layer, say, Graham technique on bodies deeply trained in other ways. The Hubbard Street Dancers, whose name is so apt for this piece, gave a rousing rendition of Harris' choreography and sent the audience out with smiles on their faces.

“Aguas que van, quieren volver” (“Waters that go want to return”) was the first quiet piece on the two programs. Choreographed by Rena Butler for a trio that could be either two men and a woman or two women and one man (as in the performance I saw, Jacqueline Burnett, Elliot Hammans, Simone Stevens, all intense, taut) the work starts as it ends, the three closely lined up one behind the other along a diagonal, nearly silhouettes. This close relation on a diagonal formed the base pattern through the 17-minute piece. Whether dancing together or separated, handing one person off to another, walking, their connections with each other recalled this start and finish. In between there was a great deal of sorrow and also anger—one person stabs himself, two seemed antagonists at points—but the conclusion of these pattern with a return to the silhouetted start brought a kind of closure.

“Return to Patience,” a company premiere of a 2015 work by in-demand Canadian choreographer Aszure Barton, was also a quiet work. For twelve dancers dressed in loose white pants and long-sleeved white tops bathed in blue light on a light blue floor and against a light blue backdrop, this was the most balletic of the works, especially in its beginning and end. Five men and seven women stood in staggered lines. To the opening notes of Caroline Shaw’s piano piece “Gustave Le Grey,” the dancers, who were barefoot in parallel sixth position, opened to first. In a gentle, understated manner, they rose on half point, lowered, slipped to second position, then to fourth diagonal, rose on half point again, and finally turned to the opposite diagonal. This marks out the square of classical ballet, but here without the usual erect presentation. The company left. One dancer, then two, took the stage. A third entered, the first two left, and so on. When the whole ensemble returned, they marked the corners of the ballet square again. The unusual choice to end a concert with a quiet piece perhaps points to Barton’s next work for the company, for she is to be their resident choreographer for the next three years.