Everything Under Control

It’s hard to predict where Hubbard Street Dance Chicago will go next. Literally. Through the repertoire selections presented in the company’s two-week run at the Joyce Theater, the dancers demonstrate a particular aptitude for moving in a way that’s endlessly surprising.

Performance

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago: “Within the Frame,” “Percussion IV,” “Beauty Chasers,” and “Blue Soup”

Place

Joyce Theater, New York, NY, April 1, 2026

Words

Rebecca Deczynski

Dominick Brown, Cyrie Topete, and Aaron Choate in “Sweet Gwen Suite” by Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon. Photograph by Michelle Reid

Really, it’s all about musicality. The dancers in the nearly 50-year-old troupe vary in style and personality, but each performs at a level of high technical mastery and, most importantly, an unmatched ability to fully embody the music that accompanies their movement. They show up precisely on the next beat with the extension of an arm or leg, or maybe the swirl of a hip or the contraction of a torso, never too early and never too late. They arrive without anticipation.

This isn’t an easy feat, and the four pieces in Hubbard Street’s second program present in them a fair number of challenges. “Within the Frame,” a 2025 work by choreographer James Gregg, makes a strong start. This piece “explores the boundaries and expectations imposed upon us, inviting reflection on identity, freedom, and the powers of embracing individuality within interpersonal connections,” he writes in the program. Its opening is arresting: Cyrie Topete stands atop of Dominick Brown, who moves their body—belly down, starfish style—clockwise, creating the effect of a moving stage. Once facing forward, Topete steps down. They are contained in a square of light. Brown moves to a metronymic beat with a quality of movement that’s almost impossibly fluid, reminiscent of popping, with an air of balletic grace.

The piece unfolds like a dance battle of sorts—or, at least, the lighting design by Slick Jorgenson gives it that feel with a makeshift arena. Brown and Topete sweep their limbs around in endless undulations with snappy accents, unfurling a flexed foot or presenting a flicked wrist. Jacqueline Burnett and Aaron Choate come into the fold and the dancers switch off in different permutations. A shift in the scene—rotating beams of light glimmer on the stage—gives it the feel of a rave as three dancers coolly flip their hands up above their heads.

Shota Miyoshi in Matthew Rushing’s “Beauty Chasers.” Photograph by Michelle Reid

“Within the Frame” loses some steam during an extended pas de deux of two dancers tick-tocking their torsos back and forth over one another, but it regains its dynamism as they speed up, moving through the synth-filled soundtrack. It feels, for so much of the work, that the dancers are exploring all the different ways their bodies could possibly move—I found myself thinking of Noé Soulier’s “Movement on Movement,” inspired by William Forsythe’s Improvisation Technologies.

The second number of the night, Bob Fosse’s “Percussion IV” (1978) similarly mandated a strict adherence to musicality. Performed by Bianca Melidor, the piece is—expectedly—set to a composition by Godron Lowry Harrell fully composed of different percussive instruments. This is classic Fosse. Melidor shimmies, pops up into arabesque, and pulls back her shoulders one by one. She moves with gusto, hitting each accent with precision, yet a touch of softness; her hands often maintain a delicate, airy quality.

The excitement of Fosse’s choreography is so frequently channeled through minute movements—a rapid shaking of the hips, for instance—so a dramatic turns à la seconde sequence near the end of “Percussion IV” feels almost too big for its container. Instead, the little things (like Melidor finishing with an audible “ta-da”) give this piece its charm.

Matthew Rushing’s “Beauty Chasers,” another 2025 piece, takes a lyrical turn across five tracks, with dancers Brown, Morgan Clune, and Michele Dooley evolving as the work progresses. In the beginning, each dancer gets their own moment, washed in golden light. There’s a floral quality to their movement as they each seem to blossom through their extensions and port de bras. Twisting around their torsos, they look like perennials caught in an April breeze.

The mellifluous choreography speeds up as the dancers curl their legs around in attitudes and billow their shoulders. The music, too, transforms—transitioning into jazz, with an eastern influence with Alice Coltrane’s “Journey into Satchidananda.” With each passage of this piece, the three dancers add to their costumes, each finishing the work wearing a beaded harness and flowy pants. This ritualistic dressing, and the open chested, rhythm-forward movement that increases in urgency, tips “Beauty Chasers” into deeply spiritual territory. It’s an entrancing kind of prayer.

Hubbard Street Dance in Aszure Barton's “Blue Soup.” Photograph by Michelle Reid

The program ended with a veritable visual feast: Azure Barton’s 2002 “Blue Soup,” which Hubbard Street revived last year. Across a hodgepodge of a soundtrack—including clips of Maya Angelou, songs in Japanese, Romanian, and French, and tracks by Paul Simon and Randy Newman—dancers dressed in big, royal blue David Byrne-esque suits move through organized formations, go all-out in personality-driven solos (such as Choate’s perfectly campy drag lipsync to “Sh-boom”), and execute the kinds of movements you might find students doing in an acting 101 exercise (i.g. “pretend to be a farm animal”). It’s completely euphoric.

There are so many memorable moments in this grab bag of delights: the coolness of two dancers shuffling, hands in their pockets, to “Jitterbug” while others run chaotically around them, in between the moving lights on stage. The electric sharpness of Shota Miyoshi in an angular, fast-moving solo. The slow ascent of all the dancers’ legs as they lift in headstands. The almost militaristic uniformity of their shoulders rising and falling as they chug in place.

It is impossible, at any given point in this piece, to guess where it will go next. What is constant, however, is the way Hubbard Street’s dancers manage to capture the expansive breadth of their musical accompaniments with complete control of limbs, cores, and facial expressions. When the curtain comes down, we’re left wanting more. Lucky for us, there’s an encore.

Rebecca Deczynski

Rebecca Deczynski is a New York City-based writer and editor publishes the newsletter Mezzanine Society. Her work has appeared in publications including Inc., Domino, NYLON, and InStyle. She graduated from Barnard College cum laude with a degree in English and a minor in dance.

comments

Featured

REVIEWS | Rebecca Deczynski