DANCE REVIEW
LCC dance performance shines

By Ana Paula Höfling

It is not often that Honolulu is graced with choreography and dancing of the caliber seen last night at Leeward Community College Theater.

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, under the artistic direction of Jim Vincent, brought us a well-selected repertoire danced by a company of fantastic dancers.

The brand new opening piece, "Counter/Part," choreographed by Vincent himself, brought to life music by Bach using movement motifs abstracted from 17th century French court dances, performed with simultaneous precision and abandon. To the sound of harpsichord, Mario Alberto Zambrano, the embodiment of the "counter" part, danced many of the same themes from "part", but elongated each one of them almost beyond recognition, establishing a dreamy, other-worldly quality. "Counter/Part" clearly shows Vincent's European influence.

Other pieces brought by the company included David Parsons' "The Envelope," a piece on its way to becoming a classic, where dancers wearing hoods and sunglasses are moved, almost against their will, by a plain white envelope.

In "Let's call the whole thing off," choreographed by Harrison McEldowney, local Charlaine Katsuyoshi partnered by Joseph P. Pantaleon, danced a smart, jazzy duet about romantic quarrels.

The most complex work of the whole evening was Ohad Naharin's "Minus 16."

Starting before intermission was over, with the house lights still up, a dancer starts "dancing" in front of the curtain. He dances as if nobody was looking, the way many of us do alone in our living rooms, first to a cha-cha-cha, then to a tango. He improvises on themes of actual social dances, quotes from hula to disco and back to cha-cha-cha. Slowly the curtain rises behind him, and we see an accumulation of dancers who echo his quirky "dancing" moves. When the stage is filled with dancers wearing plain black suits and white shirts doing seemingly random "dance moves", they break into an unexpected unison that draws applause from the audience.

The second part, danced to a Passover counting song in Hebrew, is a numerical and choreographic accumulation that builds a high level of tension that continues throughout the piece. In the end, after a wonderful audience participation section (better left as a surprise for those who still haven't seen the show) it becomes clear what the piece is really about: the pure joy and humanity of dancing.

Ana Paula Höfling is a graduate student at the Univeristy of Hawai'i-Manoa.