Dance Reviews : Hubbard Street Delivers Punchlines

By its music alone--Fats Waller, big-band swing, Willie Nelson--the Hubbard Street Dance Company gives a strong hint. But exactly what it is--the merging of ballet technique with an American pop sensibility, all splashed with zestful good humor and sheer physical pizazz--must be seen to be appreciated.

Such was the case Tuesday at Pepperdine’s Malibu campus when the returning Chicagoans seemed to be on a roll.

For one thing, they are happily thriving on an aesthetic enriched by such innovators as Twyla Tharp and Mark Morris. For another, they are prime material for it.

Nelson’s hard-twang recording of “Georgia,” as an example, becomes the impetus for company director Lou Conte’s duet of the same name. A brilliant study that fuses a hard-knocks stoicism with richly dense dance material, it weaves--subliminally--image fragments of the Act 2 “Swan Lake” pas de deux into a stony, almost esoteric, drama.

According to Tharp, it’s not floor patterns that matter, it’s the body as a roller-coaster car conveying life’s emotional jolts. And that condensation of the human experience, in pure contemporary Americana, is what Conte managed to illustrate here--with the not-inconsiderable help of Claire Bataille.

As stunning as she was in a piece tailored to her abilities and partnered briefly by the excellent Frank Chaves, she could not articulate later the Tharpian language of “Sue’s Leg,” which depends on a dancer’s flair for collapsing on cue, forgetting follow-through, regenerating instantly, etc.

That idiomatic insouciance was left to Krista Swenson, a comically pouty hoyden who delivered the punchlines in true slouch style.

But the 17-member ensemble, astutely directed by Conte, doesn’t really have any crooked seams. In his signature closer, “The ‘40s,” the dancers were a perfect chorus line of jitterbugging Pink Panthers--lovable and slyly ingratiating.

In Ron de Jesus’ “Shakti,” an intensely physical and engrossing orgy of fluid extensions performed by seemingly jointless dancers, the spirit of Ravi Shankar’s rambunctious sitar riffs raised the temperature. Here, Daniela Panessa’s solo was a deserved reward.