There aren’t too many chances to see Giordano Dance Chicago perform at home these days. The jazz dance company, now in its 63rd season and among the country’s longest-tenured dance institutions, used to mount at least two productions a year at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance — the company’s home theater since it opened more than 20 years ago.
More recently, they’ve opted for a fall concert in Skokie and scaled up touring, leaving just two nights to see them downtown this season.
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I’m an unapologetic Giordano fan. And its latest program, called “Ignite the Soul,” performed Friday and Saturday at the Harris, is a stellar example of a company that’s continuing to push itself after more than six decades. Most evident in “Ignite the Soul” is an intentional effort to demonstrate the broad spectrum of American jazz dance and its various roots and branches: tap, street dance, contemporary, ballroom, musical theater dance and, of course, theatrical jazz.
The night’s finale, a cutesy, sailor-inspired group piece called “Dumb Luck!,” is resident choreographer Al Blackstone’s latest of the trio of works he’s made for Giordano Dance Chicago so far. The company is keeping him busy. In 2024, Blackstone created a gorgeous, decadent, one-act tribute to “Rhapsody in Blue” (in honor of that iconic Gershwin suite’s 100th anniversary). Last year was “Sana,” which opens this evening for a pair of Blackstone bookends.
Those ends could not be more different. “Sana” is an uncharacteristically understated-by-comparison opener for Giordano, which typically begins an evening with a bang. A version of the Spanish word for health or healing, “Sana” relishes warm, rusty hues in its lights and costumes; a pop of jewel tones in the women’s skirts (by Devert Monet Hickman) playing off prominent saxophone in composer Stahv Danker’s original music. As a bare stage swiftly gets dressed in black curtains framing its sides, rumblings fester in the dance ensemble’s torsos and limbs; Danker’s music becomes increasingly driving, propulsive (and painfully loud—an issue that persists through most of the evening).
This, again, is the opposite of “Dumb Luck!” which has a kind of “On the Town” aesthetic: striped T-shirts, white pants, sailor hats and all. In a video introduction of the piece, Blackstone said he wanted to make something joyful to mark the United States’ 250th birthday. It’s safe to say he accomplished that goal, though some of the piece’s trappings seem chintzy and unfinished. Ill-fitting hats, a weird Manhattan Transfer cover of Weather Report’s 1977 jazz/pop banger “Birdland,” and a giant sail prominently featured at center stage that somehow also feels like an afterthought are just a few reasons “Dumb Luck!” seems not quite fleshed out — particularly when you compare it to Blackstone’s other excellent works in Chicago.
The evening’s two other new pieces from choreographers Mike Minery and Jon Rua, both first-time collaborators with Giordano, offer another set of contrasts. Minery (a convention director who rarely performs anymore), danced a charming tap duet to music by Count Basie and Frank Sinatra with Erina Ueda. (Who knew she could tap?)
For “namuH” (Human, backwards), Rua leans on that theatrical street style on display in the musicals “In the Heights” and “Hamilton.” He was in the cast of both. But there’s a rawness and refreshing degree of abstraction I wasn’t expecting and, frankly, can’t get enough of. Rua enters the topic of humanness by depicting a pack of mannequins. Dancers are strewn about the stage on their backs, bent legs pointed skyward in a quasi-rigor mortis. Periodically, the group returns to such a state of paradoxical lifelessness, dragged by a partner or semi-mechanically traversing the stage as an automaton might. I don’t think it’s an attempt at popping and locking. Rua seems to season “namuH” with street styles rather than make it the main course, flanking the piece with music by Bjork for a little extra umami.
Older pieces by Ronen Koresh and Del Dominguez with Laura Flores complete the night. The latter, “Sobroso,” was a standard GDC leaned on heavily after it premiered in 2011, but this joy bomb hasn’t been taken off the shelf for quite awhile. Thus, many of the company’s extraordinary dancers are doing the piece for the very first time and looking as if they’ve done Latin ballroom all along. The same could be said of Koresh’s “Crossing/Lines.” Coming second to last, it’s well-danced, but appears to have put in for the sole purpose of giving dancers time to change for “Dumb Luck!” Made in 2015, “Crossing/Lines” is the weaker of Koresh’s two pieces for the company (the other, “EXit 4,” is simply extraordinary). And these three excerpted sections, taken out of context, deem what should be a powerful testimony pretty unremarkable.
Lauren Warnecke is a freelance critic.
Continues through 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance, 205 E. Randolph St.; $37-$117 at 312-334-7777 and harristheaterchicago.org
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