Hubbard Street Dance Chicago.

SHUBERT THEATRE, CHICAGO APRIL 24-MAY 12, 1996 REVIEWED BY LAURA MOLZAHN

If there's one thing Hubbard Street Dance Chicago can do, it's dance. Throw anything at these dancers, from the fiendish partnering in Margo Sappington's lyrical Mirage to Twyla Tharp's clockwork freneticism in The Golden Section, and they'll do it and do it well. In their Chicago Spring Festival of Dance performances the troupe, directed by Lou Conte, looked splendid despite injuries both major (two key dancers broke their feet) and minor.

The company's choreography has been less reliable, though that seemed to have changed with the Tharp Project in 1990, as Hubbard Street mastered Twyla's classics one by one: The Fugue, Baker's Dozen, Sue's Leg. This year's premiere made especially for Hubbard Street was a disappointment, however. I Remember Clifford, a narrative dance honoring jazz composer Clifford Brown and set to six jazz pieces from the late fifties and early sixties, starred Ron De Jesus as a loner in a bar, an outsider among people too cool to hang with him. After being rejected by two women--one a sultry flirt, the other involved with someone else--he suffers some kind of breakdown and is "saved" by a preacher and finally reconciled with everyone who'd turned up their noses at him.

Reportedly Tharp had in mind Camus's The Stranger when she made this dance, but I saw nothing existential about it. Juvenile and mundane, Clifford is a mess as a piece of drama, the "hero" a comic-pathetic creature who never quite earns our interest and whose shifts are unmotivated (maybe that's where the existentialism comes in). The cliched choreography doesn't help--snapped fingers, swiveling shoulders, floating arms, debonair turns in plie. The first half was better than the second, given De Jesus's cleverly klutzy dancing as the nerdy outsider and Laura Elena Haney's artful seduction of him as four other men seduced her in "Blue Roll" But by the time the final section, "I Remember Clifford," rolled around, I was asking myself why the choreography was so much less interesting than the music.

I never thought I'd ask that about Tharp. She's had problems with narrative dances--she said as much in her autobiography--and I wondered whether this was an autobiographical dance of sorts, set in the time of her own lonely adolescence and intended to help her come to terms with it. Then I thought of another dance set to music of the same period: the 1982 Nine Sinatra Songs. Carried by its athleticism and humorous characterizations instead of Tharp's usual choreographic invention, it slides by simultaneously spoofing and celebrating a long-gone era. Perhaps Clifford is another in the same vein. But nothing carries this dance--certainly not the silly story nor mostly boring movement.

Hubbard Street's revival of Tharp's 1983 Fait Accompli showed what she--and Hubbard Street--can do. Its choreographic noodling and sustained musicality redeem a mediocre score (where Clifford degrades a good one). And dancers like Joseph Mooradian and Sandi J. Cooksey have now got Tharp in their bones, capturing her simultaneous ease and edge.

Former Tharp dancer Kevin O'Day set a new piece on the company that revealed Tharp's influence not in individual phrases, like his Quartet for IV (And Sometimes One, Two or Three), but in its thoroughgoing attention to form. Hellblondegroove, lit in lurid red and accompanied live by an electric guitarist, is a deceptively loose romp for four men and four women. Recalling late nights in bars, it's full of snake hips, woozy slow-motion fumbling, suggestions of country line dancing, and more than a little roughhousing between the sexes. Guitarist-composer John King's shouts of "Take it from the top!" and growls of "I think I love you" added considerably to the ambience. You could almost smell the stale pools of cigarette smoke and beer.