Review: Hubbard Street dancers more than sum of their limber parts

The Hubbard Street Dance Chicago is a troupe of remarkably limber dancers who can snap their spines into semi-circles from nearly any physical position. They can match leaps with their classical-dance colleagues, hoist their partners like trays of fine wine and ripple every limb in their bodies like human tides.

But forget all that.

When Hubbard Street comes to town, the residual joy comes from the challenge and insight their repertoire fuels in its audience. Monday night, the finale left people smiling — and scratching their heads — over Ohad Nabarin's "Minus 16," a succession of vignettes plumbing both the social and intimate wellsprings of dance.

Exhilarating, annoying, revealing, the dance is a collage of previously choreographed Nabarin settings, including "Anaphasa," in which the dancers collect audience members to dance onstage. The troupe alternately leads its partners through cha-cha steps and then masses to leap around and through the recruited troop, an Indian attack on the covered wagons. For them and us, it's a wonderful moment of revelation on the terrors of performance.

During Monday's performance at the Philharmonic Center for the Arts, it was also a tribute to the cool of audience member Carole Fox. Fox found herself the final "performer" after her colleagues were led offstage one by one and the dancers, on cue, dropped to the floor, feet up, around her.

An earlier segment, performed in Hasidic garb — and which, incidentally, caused a minor uproar in Nabarin's native Israel — puts the troupe through a continually expanding litany of moves. They shed coats and shoes and whip back in a human wave at the close of each physical "recitation" of an infectiously rendered Hebrew spiritual. A lone nonconformist, hanging onto his hat and coat, takes a punishing symbolic dive at the end of each whip crack.

There is a lot of political undercurrent in this beguiling piece, but you can love it on its own terms.

It's harder to love the work's opening and close. "Minus 16" begins during the second intermission, with a lone dancer wandering onstage to execute an interlude of puckered steps. It looks familiar: co-workers dancing in business dress as the "hold" music plays or the cell phone in our office chortles a bossa nova. But it's ultimately tiring.

The close is equally enigmatic: The dancers run, in pack , across and the stage, building up their momentum for — a human pyramid?

Yet Hubbard Street Dance Chicago makes the most of this work, taping revealing comments about themselves that are played, per Nabarin's instruction, during a sequence of miniature solos. Their words, as much as their improvised movement, are riveting. (Only one dancer apparently recorded an essay of silence here; in contrast, some performers in other companies have chosen to shriek or shout primal messages.)

"Minus 16," with its crazy quilt of bossa nova and Hebrew music, alternated between being charming and frustrating. It threatened to overwhelm the other works on this program. That's unfortunate, because "Strokes Through the Tail" and "Gnawa" were also meaty choices.

"Strokes Through the Tail" may be doomed to misunderstanding, however. It's a send-up of classical music and dance from Irish choreographer Marguerite Donlon that strays enough into camp to suggest homage to Ballet Trocadero.

Yet, through its gender-bending company of one Material Girl and six guys who eventually don tutus, it explores the moves that define classical stardom .

When they aren't being run white-tulle ragged by Erin Derstine — who fills in flawlessly for Cheryl Mann — the men are re-creating the moves, almost as if to themselves, that create ballet icons. It's a masterly study in choreographed self-consciousness and male dexterity.

Hubbard Street dropped "Float," which it plans to premiere in Chicago, from this program.That frankly might have been a good subsitute for "Gnawa." Nacho Duato, a Spanish choreographer, is enthralled with African and Middle Eastern music, and this one, from the little-known melodies of Moroccan musical healers, promises much. It delivers less.

The music is intriguing, the dance outstanding. But apart from a jazz-inspired solo from Tobin Del Cuore at the close of the first segment, Duato goes in a linear direction with the piece that could have benefited from digression. He incorporates stylized geometric moves and tight ensemble work that show the dancers at their strongest. Yet it's too long on the same train for me.

No one can fault this company for overworking warhorses, however. The Mozart Symphony No. 40 movements for "Strokes" aside, nearly every minute the audience is learning as it celebrates. Just how many of us knew the "Recado Bossa Nova" or a group as obscure as Tractor's Revenge before Monday?

Those pale beside the most important question, however: How soon can Hubbard Street Dance Chicago come back?