The curtain rises and reveals a Jackson Pollock painting projected on the back wall. The painting, Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) (1950), is one of the artist’s most recognizable works, with chaotic splatters in black, gray, and white covering much of its beige background. In front of this backdrop, the Hubbard Street dancers, clothed in the same palette as the painting, leap, pivot, and pirouette to the sound of John Coltrane’s jazzy interpretation of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s “My Favorite Things.” The painting, the song, and, above all, the dancers’ sharp and speedy movements all suggest a burst of uncontainable energy let loose across the stage. 

This first piece, Coltrane’s Favorite Things, sets the tone for how the evening’s three pieces together demonstrate that dance exceeds the confined space of the stage. By including media like painting and poetry, and by taking inspiration from spaces as seemingly disparate as the museum and the nightclub, the three pieces invite the audience to think of dance in the most expansive of terms. As a former dancer, I was reminded anew of dance’s accessibility. Hearing the jazzy strains of Coltrane, who wouldn’t want to start moving? Indeed, while the Hubbard dancers shimmy and jump to “My Favorite Things,” viewers’ eyes are drawn again and again to the rapid footwork. Staring at the performers’ feet, one imagines them tracing the wild, overlapping lines of the choreography all over the dancefloor, not unlike the lines of Autumn Rhythm on the back wall. 

The piece’s two planes — that is, the horizontal dance and the vertical painting — reference the work of choreographer Trisha Brown. In a 2002 performance called It’s a Draw, Brown created floor-bound drawings as she danced on top of paper while holding pieces of charcoal between her fingers and toes.1 The resulting drawings contain traces of quick, sweeping movements as the charcoal left circular lines or even footprints on the paper. These drawings served as inspiration for large-scale background projections in later pieces of hers, like 2009’s L’Amour au théâtre, in which dancers move in front of one such projection’s gestural lines. By locating the Hubbard Street company in close relation to the Pollock painting, the choreographer, Lar Lubovitch, and the stager, Jonathan E. Alsberry, emphasize that dance is not just something that takes place in a theater. Rather, the act of painting, too, is a kind of dance. Pollock, not unlike Brown in It’s a Draw, navigated his large painting by way of a kind of choreography. The dancers’ rhythms echo Pollock’s improvisational process. 

In the second piece of the evening, Nevermore, the whole company takes the stage for a dramatic performance of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.” The music, by James G. Lindsay, interweaves a reading of the poem with a dark, cinematic string arrangement. One dancer, draped in white cloth, perches on a throne formed by three dancers as the rest of the company, all dressed in black, dances in front of him, like visions come to life. The bird-like choreography alternates between halting and graceful movement styles, at one moment the sharp, pecking movement of a bird’s neck and at the next moment the fluid flapping of wings. 

Finally, in Dear Frankie, the full cast again moves to a score involving spoken words, although this time they are the words of choreographer Rennie Harris in a letter to Frankie Knuckles, the famous DJ associated with The Warehouse, a Chicago nightclub. The dancers — clad in sheer, vibrant clubbing clothes — groove to heart-racing beats. One dancer does the worm, and several dancers vogue as Harris’ voiceover discusses the importance of Frankie and The Warehouse to queer people who could express themselves and find their chosen families through the dance scene. Here, Hubbard Street demonstrates the importance of spaces beyond traditional theaters or schools to the development of dance and community. Movement styles from the club and from underground ball culture, not typically seen as fine art forms like ballet and modern dance, have been key to the contemporary practice and relevance of dance. Dear Frankie makes this point by bringing the club scene to the theater stage. 

With this concluding dance party, Hubbard Street sends the audience back out into the world, with the reminder that we, too, are dancers. Whether looking at a painting, reading a poem, or going out on the town, we encounter inspiration that moves us, oftentimes literally. I was reminded that the identity of ‘dancer’ has no barriers, no prerequisites. As long as we are moving, we are dancing. 

1.  See Helen Molesworth and Catherine Lord in Dance/Draw, ed. Helen Molesworth (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art and Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2011), 11, 19-20.

The Scholar’s Take is a series of essays by Princeton students in response to experiences at McCarter. It is part of Arts & Ideas which connects University scholarship and campus life to the work on our stage. Co-sponsored by the Humanities Council at Princeton University.