Virtual Side-By-Side Chicago Shows

Sharing the same birthplace, jazz-dance origins and emphasis on polished technique, the 22-year-old Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and the 10-year-old River North Dance Company each gave exciting, well-attended Southland performances over the weekend--the former in Glendale, the latter in Long Beach.

On Friday, Hubbard Street confirmed its reputation as a major modern dance repertory ensemble in a program at the Alex Theatre dominated by works previously presented on local stages by the Lyon Opera Ballet, the White Oak Dance Project and the David Parsons Company.

On Saturday, River North brought to the Carpenter Performing Arts Center exactly the kind of home-grown, entry-level pop diversions that Hubbard Street merchandised during its first decade--a period when it delivered what this reviewer called “dancing beyond criticism, choreography beneath it.”

In as big a coincidence as the nearly simultaneous local bookings, both Chicago troupes offered clever comic showpieces choreographed by River North dancer Harrison McEldowney: the 1993 duet “Perfidia” by his home team, the 1998 octet “Group Therapy” by the Hubbard Streeters.

Seeing the two virtually side-by-side showed how McEldowney reworked the same ideas: choosing songs with lyrics he could parody and staging formal ballroom-style routines uproariously undercut by the female partner’s compulsions.

“Perfidia” found Tina Brock sneaking away from a duet with the oblivious McEldowney for secret trysts with two other men; “Group Therapy” found Jeannie Engel sneaking away from her duet with the oblivious Ron De Jesus for secret puffs on a cigarette.

Each piece also earned laughs when a dancer sitting on the floor was suddenly yanked into the wings.

If McEldowney contributed arguably the most distinctive piece on the 10-part River North bill, the Hubbard program boasted seductive, mercurial modern-dance creations by Kevin O’Day and Nacho Duato, with Duato’s 1983 “Jardi Tancat” just about perfectly executed by the six-member cast, and with O’Day’s 1994 “Quartet for IV (and sometimes one, two or three . . .)” reaching its zenith in a virtuoso solo by the phenomenal David Gomez.

Using music by Kevin Volans, the O’Day quartet developed a complex, Tharp-influenced, all-American movement vocabulary to explore the formation and interchange of partnerships.

In contrast, the Duato piece used moody recordings by Maria Del Mar Bonet to shape an intense, Kylian-influenced social portrait at once highly specific in its pantomime motifs (mostly work tasks), yet engulfing in its physical scale--the dancers repeatedly sinking down to the floor and immediately rising into sky-sweeping lifts, for example.

To look equally flawless in this meditative, ultra-European challenge yet sell every joke in Parsons’ ultra-familiar spoof, “The Envelope” takes dancers of spectacular versatility--dancers who have taken Hubbard Street on an amazing artistic journey that only founder-director Lou Conte could have foreseen back when his company specialized in the kind of disposable and often over-the-top pastiches currently the hallmark of River North.

On Saturday, for instance, near-desperate River North women pawed themselves, yearning for sex, in co-director Sherry Zunker Dow’s duets “Vent” and “The Man That Got Away,” while both sexes pawed themselves, yearning for sex, in co-director Frank Chaves’ ensemble piece “Thief.” Both sexes got lucky in Chaves’ “Temporal Trance” and “Charanga”--finding kinetic release in the former while stripped and underwater, in the latter while dressed in red dancing to Latin rhythms.

In all these pieces, Chaves displayed plenty of structural and theatrical savvy but no movement invention.

Completing the program: Tony Savino’s energetic ode to the ‘40s, “Care to Dance;” Sam Watson and Kenny Comstock’s wildly eccentric duet “Wired”; Randy Duncan’s promising playoff between psychological isolation and social involvement “Turning Tides”; and Zunker Dow’s lyric vision of an all-female pop-dance heaven, “Glimpse,” the only work that didn’t sell itself as a showpiece and found time for significant movement development.

The dancing? Nearly faultless technically, but never deep or individual enough to make these workshoppy etudes remotely memorable.

* Hubbard Street Dance Chicago performs a partially different mixed bill Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. in the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive. $25-$30. (949) 854-4646.