Hubbard Street Dance Chicago Harris Theater for Music and Dance, 4/1-4/5
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Cerrudo’s first attempt at making dances behave like movies was 2008’s Extremely Close, whose ingenious lighting and blank white walls on wheels produced a cinematic cutting effect. Off Screen is even more thorough and successful. Its central scenic element is a giant, floaty piece of shimmering fabric, sparkly black on one side, silver on the other. Manipulated mostly by the dancers, it can form a billowing, cloudlike floor, loom overhead like a threatening sky, or suddenly cover the performers or pull one of them offstage. Like the rough-hewn wall of Johan Inger’s Walking Mad, which Hubbard Street first performed last December, it shifts shapes and paradigms.
Cerrudo sets Off Screen mostly to selections from film scores, though he never uses them in an obvious or kitschy way. I didn’t recognize the music from There Will Be Blood or Pan’s Labyrinth, and yet excerpts from these and other soundtracks are so lushly, instantly emotional that their cinematic origin is immediately apparent. A quote from Stanley Kubrick in the program sets up the dance’s premise: “A film is—or should be—more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings.”
Blush‘s purposeful alienation recalls early works by longtime Hubbard Street collaborator Daniel Ezralow, especially his 20-year-old Super Straight Is Coming Down. Like Super Straight, Ezralow’s piece on this program—2004’s SF/LB—examines a sea change from conformity to rebellion. It even opens with similar 1950s-style costumes. Set to Leonard Bernstein’s jazzy Prelude, Fugue and Riffs, it does what it sets out to do: entertain wittily.
