Last year Hubbard Street Dance Chicago won kudos and a bunch of new fans with The Art of Falling, a collaboration with Second City. I liked the show, though I found it a bit corny, and thought the dancers more than held their own. But Hubbard Street’s fall series, “An Evening of Work by William Forsythe,” has me raving as much now as the critics were then.
Even more fiendishly difficult than Quintett is the show’s closer, One Flat Thing, Reproduced, which introduces a phalanx of stark metal tables the dancers push in a dynamic rush to the front of the stage, then leap upon, balance against, lie on, and hurl themselves at, among other phenomenally athletic and gymnastic moves.
- Hubbard Street publicist Zachary Whittenburg explains that the “cannon” is actually “a vintage opera projector which creates the cloud design at the end of the piece. It runs throughout the duration of Quintett, projecting clouds, but is masked shut until the dancers remove the cap at the end of the barrel, revealing the projection.”
