{"id":358541,"date":"2010-02-24T13:58:37","date_gmt":"2010-02-24T18:58:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artscatter.com\/?p=6986"},"modified":"2010-02-24T13:58:37","modified_gmt":"2010-02-24T18:58:37","slug":"talkin%e2%80%99-hubbard-street-mr-scatter-speaks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/358541","title":{"rendered":"Talkin\u2019 Hubbard Street: Mr. Scatter speaks"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Tuesday evening Mr. Scatter stood before a friendly audience (including Scatter friends Jenny Wren and David Brown) in the lower-level lounge of the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall and talked for 20 minutes about Hubbard Street Dance Chicago<\/a>, the admirable company that was about to perform upstairs. Mr. Scatter discovered that (a) microphones are our friends, and (b) speeches are better with simple sentence structures and a lack of ten-dollar words. Mr. Scatter thanks White Bird<\/a> for the invitation. If there’s a next time, he promises to do better on the simplicity bit. Here is the manuscript of his talk, in black and white:<\/em> <\/p>\n

\"Hubbard<\/p>\n

Some of you know I do a lot of my writing<\/strong> these days for a Web site called artscatter.com, so bear with me while I scatter a bit.<\/p>\n

At Art Scatter we practice something I like to call the Scatter Method of Indirect Analysis<\/strong>, which basically tries to bring some order to the chaotic collision of free association, intuition and logic that keeps batting around inside most of our brains.<\/p>\n

The process goes something like this.<\/p>\n

You find a topic, and you stick it in the back of your mind, and you sort of forget about it, like it\u2019s a slow-cooking soup.<\/p>\n

Except not really, because from that point on, everything you see and hear becomes part of your back-burner thinking process on that particular topic. And eventually it hits the front burner.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve opened your receptors. Even when you don\u2019t actively realize it you\u2019re looking for connections, for clues, for ways to relate your everyday world to this thing you\u2019ve decided to concentrate on. It\u2019s all extremely conjectural. But sometimes intriguing clues drop in from very surprising places.<\/p>\n

I happen to think that\u2019s a good way to approach experiencing any sort of art, from reading a book to watching a dance. You, as the audience or consumer, are the finishing point of the art. Without you, it\u2019s incomplete.<\/p>\n

And because each of us brings something different to the party, any work of art has a million possibilities for completion. Or I guess that\u2019s 7 billion and counting. The artist creates, but the implications and the impact are really up to us. We want to make it the best experience we can, so we keep our tentacles attuned. See what we pick up.<\/p>\n

So. The subject is Hubbard Street Dance Chicago.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s dive in.<\/p>\n

One of the first things that struck me<\/strong> when I started investigating the company\u2019s history was that in the mid 1970s, when it began, it grew out of a studio devoted to teaching tap dance. As in \u201cBojangles\u201d Robinson<\/a> and Brenda Bufalino<\/a> and Gregory Hines<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Tap has a lot of international relatives, from the hornpipe to flamenco to Irish clogging, but it\u2019s an American<\/em> art form, with roots in slavery and the West African rhythms that became transformed on our own soil. And here\u2019s something Count Basie<\/a> had to say: \u201cIf you play a tune and the person don\u2019t tap their feet, don\u2019t play the tune.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Bing. That stuck on the Velcro at the end of my tentacles. Didn\u2019t know why, quite, but there it was. Something American. Something that pays attention to the audience.<\/p>\n

<\/span>
\nNext: I was talking with a friend who\u2019s a professional musician, and he has a son who\u2019s in his early teens, and his son\u2019s been playing an instrument for a few years. But he\u2019s tired of it. He\u2019s really into competitive sports, and he\u2019s good at it, and that\u2019s what he wants to do; he just doesn\u2019t think he has time for serious music anymore. Dad\u2019s a little stressed. He admires his son\u2019s athletic aspirations. But he knows what it takes to do music. \u201cHe\u2019s too old now, anyway,\u201d he says of his son\u2019s musical future. \u201cYou\u2019ve gotta be serious about it a lot earlier than this. But I\u2019d like him to keep it up, anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s<\/em> a bing. Because dancers start young, too. HAVE to start young. Cradle to \u2026 not grave, but cradle to burnout or the breakdown of the body.<\/p>\n

And THAT brought me to something else about Hubbard Street, and one of the choreographers whose work we\u2019ll be seeing tonight. Ohad Naharin<\/a>, who is artistic director of Israel\u2019s Batsheva Dance Company<\/a>, which many of you have seen perform in the White Bird series, didn\u2019t start dancing until he was 22 years old. In dancer training years, that\u2019s a little like deciding you\u2019re going to learn how to play baseball when you\u2019re 45, and then starting in left field for the Yankees in the World Series.<\/p>\n

So. Hubbard Street. Contemporary dance — maybe as opposed to ballet. Possibilities that defy the odds.<\/p>\n


\nBack to that tap-dancing<\/strong> for a minute. Hubbard Street has an extraordinary number of influences. International stars as diverse as Twyla Tharp<\/a> and Daniel Ezralow<\/a> and Nacho Duato<\/a> work with the dancers. But here\u2019s what\u2019s offered at the Lou Conte Dance Studio, which still exists, and which launched Hubbard Street: ballet, jazz, modern, tap, African, hip hop, yoga, Pilates. This isn\u2019t the performance company. But it\u2019s the performance company\u2019s daddy. And its attitude seems to be: We\u2019re Wide Open. That sets a tone. <\/p>\n

Next stop.<\/strong> Late last week I spent 90 minutes walking through Disquieted<\/em>, the new show of contemporary art at the Portland Art Museum<\/a>. The show is about those between places, the inarticulate brooding points of modern life. As curator Bruce Guenther says about one piece, it\u2019s about \u201chow the world shifts in an instant from pleasure to pain, from reason to chaos.\u201d<\/p>\n

Walking through, I landed on one piece in particular. It\u2019s a hyper-realistic sculpture by an artist named Ron Mueck<\/a>, and it\u2019s called Crouching Boy in Mirror<\/em>. That\u2019s exactly what it is \u2013 the figure of a very small boy, crouching, perhaps in fear, in front of a mirror, down in a corner, staring into it so his image bounces back not just at him but also at the viewer\/voyeur. It\u2019s the kind of mirror that lines the walls of pretty much every dance studio in the land, but its effect is very different.<\/p>\n

When I was done with Disquieted<\/em> I walked a few yards to the museum\u2019s European galleries, because something was tickling me, something I wanted to check out.<\/p>\n

Stories. That was it.<\/strong> There were those familiar Luca Giordano<\/a>s and Jean-Baptiste Greuze<\/a>s and Michel Corneille<\/a>s. They all told stories, except you didn\u2019t know the stories\u2019 arcs. Not quite stories, then. Moods<\/em>. The essence of story, the elements, without the narrative facts. And after all this time of formalism, abstraction, the absence of content except for the form and materials of the artwork itself, here we were again: Art about something outside itself. Dramatic art. Art with stories, even if you weren\u2019t quite sure what the stories meant. Connections. That\u2019s what\u2019s happening in the late 20th century and early 21st century art of Disquieted<\/em>, too.<\/p>\n

So \u2013 very contemporary art, with very real connections to the art of the past. Does dance work like that, too?
\n
\nOne more scatter.<\/strong> Last Thursday night my wife and I went to see BodyVox-2, the young second company of the Portland touring dance troupe BodyVox<\/a>. It was a program of short pieces, pretty much all of which I\u2019d seen before, and several of which I identify specifically with certain dancers in the main company: I know the pieces through the way these particular dancers move. Seeing them performed by other dancers made me concentrate more on the dances themselves, and to appreciate them as discrete aesthetic accomplishments with lives beyond the original sets of muscles that performed them. It made me appreciate in a new way the invention and sharp editing that created them. In other words: Even contemporary works have histories.<\/p>\n

Have we muddled this soup<\/strong> quite enough yet? Let\u2019s add a little pepper and Tabasco and see if we can serve it up.<\/p>\n

Let me read you the beginning of a review from a year ago by Marcia B. Siegel<\/a>, the very witty and incisive dance critic, writing in the Boston Phoenix<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cHubbard Street Dance Chicago\u2019s Celebrity Series program at the Cutler Majestic last weekend could have been a primer of the ways not to dance ballet. All four dances sampled our taken-for-granted repertoire of everyday actions, gestures, and situations as a basis for movement. Working this way, the choreographer can develop the expertise and physicality of virtuoso ballet without the alienating effects of \u2018technique.\u2019 Hubbard Street dancers are terrific turners and jumpers and precision movers, and they also look friendly.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Aha. Now we\u2019re getting somewhere.<\/p>\n

If I\u2019m reading Siegel right, a couple of interesting things come out of this opening paragraph.<\/p>\n

First,<\/strong> the way Hubbard Street dances is not the way you approach ballet. This even though most contemporary dance companies around the world include ballet technique in their daily studio routines, and at least deconstructed versions of ballet are knitted into a lot of contemporary dances. A contemporary dancer is expected to be familiar with, if not expert at, ballet moves. It\u2019s part of a flexible dancer\u2019s repertoire.<\/p>\n

Second,<\/strong> Hubbard Street\u2019s dances reflect the way we live: our \u201ceveryday actions, gestures and situations.\u201d Unlike classical story ballet, it\u2019s not mythic or fairy-tale. It\u2019s an art of the people. Democratic.<\/p>\n

Third,<\/strong> the company\u2019s dancers are nevertheless virtuosic, but not in an off-putting way. Unlike ballet, Siegel seems to argue, Hubbard Street\u2019s contemporary approach puts no artificial barriers between itself and its small-D democratic audience. Instead they show us a more \u201cnatural\u201d virtuosity.<\/p>\n

Which leads to, fourth,<\/strong> they\u2019re friendly<\/em>. We like \u2019em. They don\u2019t make us feel like we don\u2019t know the rules. They\u2019re approachable. They speak our language. And when you speak the same language as your audience, you can say some things that are disquieting. Like, in the case of Naharin\u2019s Tabula Rasa<\/em>, which we\u2019ll see tonight, maybe loneliness is a core element of modern life.<\/p>\n

Now, as audience members, I don\u2019t believe we have to choose between the high artificiality of ballet and the low artificiality of contemporary dance. There are many things to admire in both, and the relationship between the two is closer than a lot of true believers on either side care to admit. Contemporary choreographers create dances all the time for so-called traditional ballet companies. You\u2019ll see that cross-fertilization especially tonight, I think, in Jorma Elo<\/a>\u2019s dance Bitter Suite<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Time for a backtrack.<\/strong> Ohad Naharin? Jorma Elo? Didn\u2019t I say Hubbard Street seemed like an American<\/em> dance company? Yes, I did. And I don\u2019t think that\u2019s a contradiction. The physical borders of countries matter less in the modern world than the borders of the mind. My wife and I were to have a visit from a Chinese professor a few days ago, and at the last minute the Chinese agency governing her visit abroad canceled her trip to Portland, which hadn\u2019t been pre-approved. She was in another state, and her superiors decided she couldn\u2019t leave it to take a side trip to Oregon. End of story. She was outside of China, but China was with her every step of the way.<\/p>\n

So, tonight we have a Finnish dancemaker, Elo, and an Israeli dancemaker, Naharin, and a Swedish dancemaker, Johan Inger<\/a>, having their work set on a company of mostly American dancers whose new artistic director, Glenn Edgerton, comes to Chicago from running the Nederlands Dans Theatre, essentially switching jobs with Hubbard Street\u2019s previous artistic director, Jim Vincent, who now holds the same post that Edgerton vacated in the Netherlands. Wow!<\/p>\n

This openness, this internationalism, IS American, I think. That is, it represents America at its least xenophobic and at its generous best \u2013 the place that welcomes the best ideas and the most innovative thinking, no matter where they come from.<\/p>\n

So. What will that innovative thinking<\/strong> look like tonight?<\/p>\n

Like so many contemporary companies, Hubbard Street keeps a core of balletic movement in its kit but stretches its movements into new patterns that are more calisthenic, kinetic, street-savvy. This is going to show up in Naharin\u2019s piece, Tabula Rasa<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The images in this dance can be very broad, as in a female dancer\u2019s collapse to the stage as a male dancer walks away instead of catching and cradling her. Is that funny? Is it startling? Is it cruel? Is it, in Marcia Siegel\u2019s words, part of \u201cour taken-for-granted repertoire of everyday actions, gestures, and situations\u201d? Is it just life?<\/p>\n

I almost wrote that Tabula Rasa<\/em> is more about form and less about story. But that\u2019s not it. It\u2019s what we were talking about earlier, the guts of storytelling without the skeleton to give it narrative sense.<\/p>\n

Visually, this dance is a little like the smudging and softening that Impressionism brought to representational painting, or, in its more radical moments, like Cubism with its angular, barely recognizable evocations of the \u201creal.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, dance is always dealing with the human body as its medium, not with paint or clay, and so it can never break entirely free of realism, and it always retains an element of story, even if the story is non-narrative and open-ended. Every human being is a story, at least implicitly. So when we move these human-being stories in patterns, what does it mean? No longer \u201conce upon a time.\u201d But something<\/em>.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ll see a slow, sad swaying of these bodies, echoing up and down a line. Maybe once and again one body will stop swaying \u2013 will just stand still \u2013 and another will bump into it, then turn away. Like so much contemporary dance, this one seems partly \u201cabout\u201d the difficulty of making connections, and about that point of extremity where trust and lack of trust meet and become quizzically the same. Can I trust you? Must<\/em> I trust you? Will you catch me? Must<\/em> you catch me?<\/p>\n

Once, speed was of the essence.<\/strong> Speed, and also spectacle. Think of dashing dances like Le Corsaire<\/em>, or of Martha Graham<\/a>\u2019s visual feasts.<\/p>\n

The dances we’ll see tonight are more elemental, more stripped down, less concerned with dazzling you and more with drawing you into the often elongated stillness of the moment. It\u2019s disquieting. It\u2019s modern architecture. No gargoyles jutting out from its sleek sides. Or maybe the gargoyles are sunken into the steel. Surely there are elements in this evening\u2019s dances of Tanztheatre<\/a>, or dance theater, that theoretical outcropping of German Experessionism in which the visual and movement aspects of performance are fused to create a dramatic whole.<\/p>\n

Now. I said something<\/strong> about even contemporary dances having histories. Elo\u2019s opening piece on tonight\u2019s program, Bitter Suite<\/em>, has history embedded, both the history of culture and the history of dance. It starts in a darkened group, with individual dancers peeling away from the clump. We\u2019re in an exaggerated place, and the exaggerations elicit laughter, but it\u2019s rarely easy laughter, the laughter of lightness and escape. These are nervous jokes, ironic jokes. It\u2019s the sort of pit-in-the-stomach laughter that comes from realizing suddenly that you\u2019ve been caught in an awkward position and you probably look, well, kind of stupid. Elements of court dance pop up amid fanfare music. Isn\u2019t this a saucy dish to set before the king?<\/p>\n

This piece is in the netherworld between contemporary and ballet, and it seems to me to pulse with a sense of the past that is both celebratory and mournful. In a pas de deux<\/em> you find something gangly and graceful, memories of myth and the matings of the faun. Here is a piece, stripped down as it is, that nevertheless retains the elegiac quality of classical romanticism. It makes me think of sleeping beauties and briar roses and Charles Perrault<\/a>. In modern dress, of course, and somehow denuded. What if this dance were in fairy-tale costume instead of gym clothes? How different would it feel? Why is it stripped down? Without its pomp, can it stand on ceremony?<\/p>\n

From what I\u2019ve seen on YouTube<\/strong> of Inger\u2019s Walking Mad<\/em> \u2013 and that\u2019s all I\u2019ve seen of it \u2013 this closing piece has the chance to be both intensely disquieting and spectacularly funny. First, it\u2019s set to the narcotic metronome of Ravel\u2019s Bolero<\/em>, and if that doesn\u2019t make you think automatically of Bo Derek<\/a>, you\u2019re either younger or older than I am. I\u2019m not sure this music can be treated in any way but with affectionate travesty, and that appears to be what Inger offers it.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s return to that Marcia Siegel review and listen to some excerpts from her response to Walking Mad<\/em>. It\u2019s terrific writing, no matter what you think of her opinions:<\/p>\n

The dance, she writes, is \u201can expert example of Euro-Dada, with menacing moving scenery and lights, joky movement, important but dispensable clothing, spastic love, and the kitschiest music in the world, Ravel\u2019s Bolero<\/em>. The piece has the manic energy of Ohad Naharin\u2019s Minus<\/em> series and the misogyny of Tanztheater. All the women seem to be victims; all the men are anti-heroes.\u201d<\/p>\n

She refers to \u201ca jittery, pelvis-grinding chorus line wearing tiny red dunce caps.\u201d She talks about a woman dancer \u2013 and this takes us back to the crouching boy staring in the mirror in Disquieted<\/em> \u2013 who is \u201chunkering down in a corner between two walls.\u201d Soon, Siegel continues, the woman is \u201cbeset by men barging in one after another and slinging her around, pinning her to the walls, in a nightmare of amorous entrapment.\u201d And the walls, Siegel points out, literally accordion in to keep the woman in her corner.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s<\/em> disquieting. There\u2019s a story here, a story without a skeleton. And that leaves it wide open to conjecture. Is it tragedy? Is it Theatre of Cruelty? Is it farce? <\/p>\n

So. Let\u2019s take all these scattered thoughts<\/strong> and try to tie them together.<\/p>\n

One.<\/strong> Hubbard Street has street roots.<\/p>\n

Two.<\/strong> It\u2019s open to a broad sweep of styles, inspired by everyday actions and everyday thoughts. It makes democratic art.<\/p>\n

Three.<\/strong> It offers second chances. It works in an art form in which you can start late, because technique, while essential, is less apparent than in ballet. We talked about performers starting late, but I think the point is even more important for audiences. You don\u2019t have to be a lifelong ballet geek. You don\u2019t have to bring to this dance your study, only your life.<\/p>\n

Four.<\/strong> Well, yes, that seems American.<\/p>\n

Five.<\/strong> Like contemporary art of all sorts, Hubbard Street\u2019s work reflects contemporary life. And that life is nervous and unsettling.<\/p>\n

Six.<\/strong> Maybe it\u2019s new, but this art rides on the shoulders of history. It can\u2019t shake it off, and it doesn\u2019t really want to.<\/p>\n

We live in a time<\/strong> when time itself is malleable, when it comes at us in folds and waves, when we are free to pick and choose from it, to make a collage of our art and our lives, using what we will of our collective and personal pasts to create our currencies and our futures. These dancers, these dancemakers, this company reflect that.<\/p>\n

It isn\u2019t even postmodern anymore. It\u2019s post-postmodern, because it\u2019s no longer self-conscious. It just is. It\u2019s the air we breathe. History, inhale. Future, exhale. And here we are, somewhere between.<\/p>\n

Shall we dance?<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Tuesday evening Mr. Scatter stood before a friendly audience (including Scatter friends Jenny Wren and David Brown) in the lower-level lounge of the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall and talked for 20 minutes about Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, the admirable company that was about to perform upstairs. Mr. Scatter discovered that (a) microphones are our […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5341,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-358541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5341"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=358541"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358541\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=358541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=358541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=358541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}