DANCE REVIEW : Hubbard Street Runs Into Some Dead-Ends

IRVINE — Attractive, exuberant and disciplined, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago offered a four-part program of familiar works by Daniel Ezralow, Margo Sappington and Twyla Tharp. Unfortunately, the dancers’ pizazz couldn’t mask the problems in several of the works at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

Ezralow, for instance, is a choreographer full of ideas but not exactly a master of putting them together. His “Read My Hips” is an aerobic ensemble workout that aspires to comment on social alienation, the dancers’ flailing movements often coinciding with the heavy beats of Michel Colombier’s original score.

The not-so-latent competitive elements in the group are brought to the foreground Friday night in two episodes--a wrestling match (between Patrick Mullaney and Alberto J. Arias) and a standoff-between-the-sexes (Krista Swenson and Geoff Myers).

The second event also takes on larger social significance when company members circle round their chosen champion as if each is a totem figure.

Neither episode ends by making a point, however. Ezralow goes from one sequence to another to another, tying them together through repetition of block movements--in unison and in canon--and particularly with slinky hip moves signaled by the title.

But the episodes don’t progress. The choreographer just shifts from one thing to something else. And to finish, he can only mass the full company for a sock-it-to-the-audience close. To be sure, the company certainly danced it full out.

Ezralow’s “Super Straight is coming down” (music by Tom Willems) is even more inconclusive, although its picture of contemporary Angst is potentially far more grim in its tight focus on five figures. But surprisingly, the work suddenly peters out.

At least it allowed Mullaney a dynamite series of gymnastic floor maneuvers, and gave David Gomez, Adrienne Parker, Matt Rivera and Lynn Sheppard brief but intensely compelling character opportunities.

The good-natured Chicagoans tried earnestly to make something heavily erotic out of the “Tango Argentino” rip-off vamps in Sappington’s “Cobras in the Moonlight” (music by Astor Piazzolla). But it was hard not to smile at their out-of-character efforts.

The company, which began acquiring Tharp repertory in 1990, can pride itself on mastering the speed, force, ease and wit required in the 1979 “Baker’s Dozen,” set to music by Willie (The Lion) Smith. Still eluding many of the dancers, however, are the easy modulations among these elements that Tharp demands, often within a single movement phrase.

Friday’s performance was part of the Feet First Contemporary Dance Series.

Hubbard Street altered its name slightly in November to emphasize its Chicago base. On Feb. 12 and 13 at UCLA, the company will dance a mostly different program, including several other Tharp pieces.