Dancing is everything at Giordano Dance Chicago. And the dancers looked amazing at the company’s 53rd season opener Friday and Saturday at the Harris Theater, hitting as hard and with as much focus as a boxer determined to be champ.
Choreography is secondary. Its main purpose is to showcase what the Giordano dancers do best: extroverted, competition-style, highly polished dancing that combines the clear lines of ballet with the down-home, earthy appeal of dances like the black bottom and the bullfrog hop, which fed early 20th century jazz dance.
In the interest of showing off the dancers’ strength, facility and control, the company’s choreography tends to be speedy, busy, with lots of rapid-fire shifts of the ensemble, but easy to read. Numerous exits and entrances facilitate short bits, and the positions of the body are extreme: Floor work might alternate (rapidly, of course) with super-powered, very high lifts, extensions and jumps. Diagonals are strong. The many unison sections display the performers’ precision timing and concentrate their impact.
When Philadelphia-based Ronen (Roni) Koresh, an Israeli native, choreographed “EXit4” for the Giordano company two years ago it was a breath of fresh air, combining a seductive Middle Eastern flair with teasing suggestions of a dramatic arc and underlying meaning. Koresh’s world premiere for Giordano on this program, however, felt less fresh. “Crossing/Lines” repeats the features of “EXit4” — multiple sections, the folk-dance look of wide legs and swinging arms, plenty of Middle Eastern music — but seems incoherent, not mysterious. Snatches of voiceovers, difficult to hear, make obscure points; for example, a recording of a famous Mae West quote (“When I’m good, I’m very good. But when I’m bad, I’m better.”) suits the female trio that follows it but seems to have no relation to the rest of the dance.
A full-company work in seven sections, “Crossing/Lines” can be entertaining. Attempts at humor near the end are welcome, though their similarities to the work of Ohad Naharin are not to their advantage. The staggering, the skipping, the slapping of one’s own body and the “tribal” inward-facing circles get old. Though ordinarily I like loud music, the selections for the final two sections were so bombastic and played at such a volume that all I could think was, “Wow, this is really loud.”
Repertory works provided somewhat different showcases. Del Dominguez and Laura Flores’ “Sabroso” (2011) comes right out of the ballroom-competition world. Though the 10 dancers do their best to humanize its clockwork Latin moves, racetrack choreography leaves little room for rhythmic nuance. The tasty mix of classic Copacabana-style music, by the likes of Tito Puente and Eddie Palmieri, is roughly handled, the songs chopped off so that the dancing can take a new direction.
Ron De Jesus’ 2003 “Prey” reveals the choreographer’s many years with Hubbard Street, challenging its seven dancers with elegantly sustained gestures, rotated torsos, powerful lifts. The end — a woman running across the backs of three men to leap into the void — is always a killer. But the work’s “savage” aspect, its blood lust and hyperbolic sexual tension, feel overdone.
Christopher Huggins’ 2007 “Pyrokinesis” is perhaps the perfect vehicle for what the Giordano dancers do so well. Though the gentle, carefully interwoven opening sections — set to George Winston’s piano music — are a nice change of pace, they also set off what follows, when the hot, uber-fast jazz-funk music of United Future Organization breaks out. So do the dancers, as tricks abound: the splits, rapid undulations, insanely fast chaine turns. The crowd went wild.
Laura Molzahn is a freelance critic.