Coming On Strong : Hubbard Street Dancers to Bring a Premiere Look at Violence to Irvine

Like many artists, choreographer Kevin O’Day works from creative raw materials--wisps of memories, private thoughts, feelings clumsily articulated--that may never be directly evident to the audience.

He was ruminating on “confrontation, a kind of Frankenstein meets evangelist [idea],” O’Day said, while devising “HELLBLONDEGROOVE,” his new abstract dance exploring violent physical expression.

But you won’t see monsters or ministers in the final product, which Hubbard Street Dance Chicago will premiere this weekend at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

What audiences will see, he said, is the “vernacular movement” he used to try to indicate how today’s urban youths, bombarded by violent imagery on MTV, the news or in other media, relate to each other in a vastly more physically confrontational ways than did youths of previous generations.

“There’s a dark side to people,” said O’Day, 33. “People have evil things inside, so I explored maybe having one dancer push someone in the head . . . or looking like they were going to hit someone, then not hit them.

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Likewise, his thoughts about Tourette’s syndrome, a rare disorder involving severe tics and involuntary verbal outbursts, gave rise to certain motifs in the new piece--although you won’t see or hear dancers “flip out,” he said.

“The work isn’t about these crazy ideas I have, but they spur the direction, the general image,” O’Day said recently. “Then you hone the piece and it starts to take its own shape.”

Hubbard Street, whose founder Lou Conte has a musical-theater background, is a 20-member group rooted in jazz dance but with heavy ballet training. It will perform O’Day’s 18-minute octet for men and women Saturday and Sunday.

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Tonight and Friday, the troupe will perform “I Remember Clifford,” a major 40-minute work that Twyla Tharp created for Hubbard last year. It is set to music by such renowned jazz figures as Ornette Coleman, Benny Golson and Charles Mingus. (During its engagement, the troupe will also perform other Tharp works, including “Nine Sinatra Songs” and a Mauricio Wainrot piece.)

Said Conte: “It’s basically about a central character that is alienated from society . . . and trying to fit in.”

The Windy City company gained notoriety in American dance when it became custodian of some of Tharp’s works in 1990, after she decided not to maintain a permanent troupe herself. Hubbard has since also acquired or commissioned pieces by contemporary-dance makers Daniel Ezralow, James Kudelka and Margo Sappington.

O’Day previously gave the company a quartet he choreographed last year for Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Project.

“Quartet for IV (and sometimes one, two or three . . .)” will be danced Friday and Saturday.

A former member of White Oak and American Ballet Theatre who has appeared as a guest artist with New York City Ballet, O’Day is best known for his mid-’80s tenure as a leading dancer with Tharp’s group.

These days, however, O’Day is choreographing more than dancing. The Detroit native said during a recent phone interview from his Chicago hotel room that in November he crafted a work for NYCB and two weeks ago finished a solo for Baryshnikov to perform with White Oak in March.

“I’ve mostly been getting [choreography] jobs for ballet lately,” he said, “but I like coming to Hubbard because the experience is completely different, I explore different things. . . .

“The last piece I did, for NYCB, was a very small chamber piece for six dancers [set] to a Dvorak string trio. It was very light and easy and used traditional, classical ballet vocabulary with no vernacular movement whatsoever. I wanted the next piece to be completely different.”

With “HELLBLONDEGOOVE,” O’Day tried to capitalize on Hubbard dancers’ fortes, to place sections of the “very rhythmical, driving” dance in high contrast.

“Krista Swenson and Patrick Mullaney are shorter and more muscular and compact and have a particular way of moving that’s very compact and quick. Jennita Russo is really strong and has a great way of looking strong without being pretentious and has a real sex appeal without pretension--and it’s not cutesy or coquettish--so I made a section around her and four men.”

O’Day collaborated with New York composer John King to tailor the music around each section, using a computer to manipulate King’s “menacing, avant-garde” score.

“I’m impressed with certain filmmakers, like Quentin Tarantino, and how they make the music important to what you’re seeing on the screen--it supports it--and I’ve been working with John from the beginning, playing with how I wanted the piece to sound, then changing things with him.”

O’Day readily admits that working with Tharp for eight years (O’Day also danced her works while both were at ABT and danced with her pickup company in the early ‘90s) influenced his choreographic style.

“It’s like your parents,” he said. “You have their values because you come from them. I don’t copy what she does, and the more I experience, the more I get farther and farther away from her [influence]. But yes, the influence is there.”

And the influence goes both ways, he said.

“The fact is that when you work so closely with someone for so long, they take from you, they rely on you.”

That kind of give-and-take, he said, is what it’s all about.

“When you go into a [dance studio] with people, it’s about teaching them something and having them teach you something. Success for me is if that piece [I’m choreographing] is a learning experience for me and the dancers and sends me into the next piece.”

* Hubbard Street Dance Chicago appears at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive. Performances tonight through Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. $22-$28. (714) 854-4646.