Hubbard Street dedicates their entire fall program to the great William Forsythe, reviving “Quintett,” sinking their chops into all-male quartet “N.N.N.N.” and, most excitingly, “One Flat Thing, reproduced,” the choreographic equivalent of splitting the atom. “One Flat Thing, reproduced” is a piece for fourteen dancers moving through a grid of twenty large rectangular tables, cued not by music, but by an unbelievably intricate system of internal cues: each dancer is triggered by another for a sequence of motions that in turn triggers another one, two, three, half dozen dancers each playing their own part in an endless string of triggers. The ensemble must be highly alert to each other or the machine grinds to a halt. Forsythe’s incredibly complex movement score looks like one of those late nineties attempts to map the internet and can be found, along with a dozen other data modeling tools applied to the piece, at the website project Synchronous Objects; it’s well worth a visit, especially if you’re curious how a geographer uses GIS software to create a 3-D landscape or how frequently dancers visit a spot on the stage. From the seats, watching Forsythe’s systemic mind at play is a fascinating delight—an endless web of pathways to follow for the curious witness. (Sharon Hoyer)
Hubbard Street Dance at the Harris Theater, 205 East Randolph, (312)334-7777. Thursday-Sunday, October 15-18. $55-$89.
New Angles: Hubbard Street Dance is Back on Stage in "Re/turn" “I’m feeling like: Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue,” Linda-Denise Fisher-Harrell tells me when I ask how she approached curating “Re/turn,” running November 18-21 at the Harris Theater.
