Daniel Ezralow’s “Lady Lost Found,” one of two exceptional new pieces brought out earlier this week by Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, is a beguiling star vehicle for 19-year-old Mario Zambrano masquerading as a Highland fling.
The fling is there, too–sort of. Ezralow’s new 14-minute piece for Zambrano and two couples boasts a lively but surprising take on Percy Grainger’s tantalizing arrangements to Irish and Scottish folk songs.
This infectious, uplifting piece plays counter to its Celtic melodies, upending expectations and revealing move after move, ensemble bit after ensemble bit that show off Ezralow’s own highly original choreography as complement to the music more than jiglike echo.
Meanwhile, early on, Zambrano, clad boldly in plaid kilts while the couples wear more sedate white silks, dominates the stage, dancing with various groupings of the others and then easing them to either side of the stage and off, serving as the lone figure of continuity in ever-changing, fast-moving dance.
“Lady Lost Found” has a lot of fetching sidestepping, the dancers moving from side to side along the proscenium, Zambrano in particular darting about with fleet, side-moving footwork as a recurring motif.
There’s an underlying impishness throughout: The work begins with a woman’s narrated paean on lost love but turns out to be about a frolicsome kid brother, who is joined in one section by David Gomez and Joseph P. Pantaleon to form a trio of drunken sailors.
Like just about all of the work, including the unexpectedly sensual quartet to “Danny Boy,” “Lady Lost” is full of surprise, down to its lively, irresistible group finale.
Zambrano is amazing, boyish and bursting with pep, nowhere more memorable than when early on he spins so fast he threatens to drill through the stage, seemingly without effort until the last go-round, when swirls of sweat come spinning off his forehead.
“Na Floresta,” Nacho Duato’s moodier, more full-bodied work, first created for the Nederlands Dans Theatre in 1990, features five couples dancing before a dark, abstract black forest, clad in satiny, flowing rainbow attire designed by the choreographer himself. Literally named “the forest,” set to the South American strains of Brazilian composer Heiter Villa-Lobos, “Na Floresta” offers both beautiful, interesting and unusual design flushed with passion and a haunting atmosphere.
Seizing on the forest as an image of primeval mystery, Duato’s intricate couplings also make room for the passionate, agonizing and crisply danced solo work of Jennita Russo, another rising Hubbard talent.
Two Twyla Tharp masterworks framed Tuesday’s Shubert Theatre opening: “Baker’s Dozen,” a breezy, romantic, deceptively smooth-looking work with a marvelous design and an execution as milky as the 12 dancers’ costumes, and the irrepressible “The Golden Section.”
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Hubbard Street Dance Chicago
When: Through May 11
Where: Shubert Theatre, 22 W. Monroe St.
Phone: 312-902-1500
