Almost quietly, dance history, of a sort, just got made: Chicago’s two largest troupes completed stints at two important outdoor stages, amounting to an unofficial alfresco fest of the city’s terpsichorean best and brightest.
Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, the home-grown company that could, launched its 20th-anniversary season with performances — and infectious bonhomie — at Navy Pier’s Skyline Stage. Saturday’s free finale, in fact, was standing-room-only.
The transplanted Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, getting stronger with every outing, made an important return to the Ravinia Festival. Both troupes presented tried-and-true favorites instead of risk-taking new work. But both wowed their audiences with top-drawer dance, delivering summertime zest that bodes well for the season to come.
The best news for the Joffrey is its very presence at Ravinia, broadening its audience a bit and returning, after an 18-year absence, to a crucial, prestigious showcase. Wednesday’s well-attended opening seemed another rite in the region’s on-going adoption of the relocated troupe. Audience enthusiasm, particularly for Gerald Arpino’s invigorating but familiar finale, “Light Rain,” was warm, genuine and welcoming.
The selections, too, echoing programs performed by the troupe last winter at the Shubert Theatre, made for a prudent, shrewd potpourri of classical elegance, hip experiment and offbeat comedy. Robert Joffrey’s beautifully tailored “Pas Des Deesses,” his tribute to three great ballerinas of the Romantic age (Lucille Grahn, Fanny Cerrito and Marie Taglioni), is a chamber piece with soaring style and passionate lyricism.
Maia Wilkins, Lorena Feijoo and Beatriz Rodriguez, who danced the roles Wednesday backed by Ernesto Quenedit as Arthur St. Leon, lacked a little of the expressiveness of their winter performance. But they are among the company’s best classical stylists, and they were not only fluid and technically impressive, but they’ve added a bit of coyness as they woo the audience with telling glances.
Pilobolus’ 1975 “Untitled,” which begins with elaborate sight gags and moves through a “Seven Ages of Man” apotheosis, endures as both an emblem of its experimental times and the power of collaborative dance. Arpino’s “Valentine” is a brief, feisty, pugilistic duet for Rodgriguez and Pierre Lockett, backed by the jazz-like plucks and vocal noises of contrabass player Joseph Guastafeste.
Jodie Gates and Lockett lead the still exhilarating, still sexy and ingeniously designed “Light Rain,” with Gregory Russell a standout amongst the many brief solo turns.
Hubbard’s Thursday opener was arguably even tighter and more energized, the dancers clearly keyed up by the anniversary spirit, from the sprightly opening performance of Danny Ezralow’s “Lady Lost Found” to the bows after Lou Conte’s “The ’40s,” complete with roses all around.
Always a sharply focused, tightly drilled company, the Hubbard Streeters were on fire Thursday. The rendition of Tywla Tharp’s masterpiece, “The Golden Section,” was danced with individual intensity and expressiveness, illuminating not only the work’s wonderful structure, but its complex commentary on the deeper meanings underlying all dance: community and trust, poetically balanced, in the end, by the lone individual, the haunting solo wonderfully delivered by Laura Haney.
Just as Pilobolus represented the ’70s for Joffrey, David Parsons’ “The Envelope,” back after an absence, seemed to sum up the best of the ’80s, with its fanciful cynicism and juicy pokes at classical dance. Appropriately, the program ran the gamut, with “The Envelope” on hand for laughs, Margo Sappington’s lustrous “Mirage” on hand for beauty and romance and “The ’40s,” the company’s irrepressible signature, an abiding celebration of joy.
