Hubbard Street 2 is two things: the training company of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and its community-outreach arm. On July 20, at a free performance for elementary school kids at the Vittum Theatre, these two missions collided.
The concert opened with Ron De Jesus’s Lucid Dream, probably because it’s a difficult piece and the dancers needed the practice. It’s also a piece incorporating everything I hated about ballet in elementary school: soporific music, airy-fairy costumes, and–especially–overt displays of crotch that no one is supposed to notice. “Don’t be so immature!” our teacher would hiss as we tittered; but I’m as mature as I’m going to get, and a dance belt still draws my eye. I’m just not ashamed of it anymore. Kids are, however, and this group whooped so hard they had to be hushed throughout the piece.
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What determines whether something is watchable without blushing is whether it’s being done on the street and in clubs today. That explains why the kids at the Vittum stopped chortling and began to clap along when the company presented Kristofer Storey’s I Wantchu Kool, Cuz U Blow My Mind (done to the Beatles’ “I Want You,” covered by Bobby McFerrin). It’s choreographed in the overtly sexual vocabulary of current popular dance, with lots of hip swiveling and posturing. But to a roomful of six- and eight- and ten-year-olds it’s familiar–just background noise. The dancers weren’t doing anything or wearing anything that the kids haven’t seen on MTV.
Hubbard Street 2 does make a good faith effort to educate: choosing a child from the audience to choreograph a piece based on moves she’d seen during the concert worked wonderfully. As the volunteer chose four of the six dancers, the outcasts mugged–not being chosen is something every kid can relate to. The dancers tried out various combinations under the girl’s critical eye, then moved in unison from a leap to a twirl to a little sliding step offstage. The kids yelled their approval of what one of them had wrought–and the dancers repeated the sequence.
