“Just out of curiosity . . . ” Aszure Barton said on a recent afternoon, as she asked a couple of dancers to switch places during a Hubbard Street Dance Chicago rehearsal. The swap was an attempt to balance out heights and get just the right look in a row of performers.
Surveying the results, she liked what she saw: “There, perfect.”
It was just one small moment as the internationally recognized, Canadian-American choreographer put the finishing touches on her final work of a three-year residency with Hubbard Street.
The 25-minute piece, featuring all 15 company dancers and one guest artist, will be one of two world premieres featured as part of Hubbard Street’s May 14, 15 and 17 performances at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance.
This season-ending appearance back in the contemporary company’s hometown comes just weeks after a high-profile two-week run at the Joyce Theater in New York, one of this country’s most important dance venues.
For her fourth and final commission, Hubbard Street leaders gave Barton free rein – no strictures or parameters of any kind. “That’s the beauty here. Make what you want to make,” said the choreographer, who has worked with everyone from Mikhail Baryshnikov and Cyndi Lauper to the English National Ballet.
Barton began working on this piece during a two-week visit in December. The result is non-narrative and titled “LubDub,” drawing on a medical term that describes the familiar pattern of the human heartbeat.
Asked to discuss the movement vocabulary she employs here, Barton demurred. But when the descriptor “unruly” was suggested, she was quick to embrace it.
“That’s a good word for it,” she said. “I really feel I’m at that place right now where I want to scream it out loud and share. I’m so pissed off at the way the world is right now, and I see how dancers work together, and I’m so inspired by their willingness to work as a collective. And I’m wanting to share that energy.”
There are plenty of quirky, unexpected sights in the piece: A dancer being dragged on the floor at the end of a snaking chain of performers. Spasmodic jerks of the body. A male dancer shuffling haltingly along in a kind of squat position, with another seated dancer wrapped over one of his legs.
The work’s predominantly electronic score combines the music of three composers – Jlin, a Chicago-based musician who has worked with everyone from Bjork to multimedia artist Nick Cave; Kara-Lis Coverdale of Montreal, Quebec, and Norwegian folk fiddler Susanne Lundeng. “I felt this heart pull from all three,” the choreographer said.
Barton thinks of herself almost as much as a composer as a choreographer and assembled the score from pre-existing works with the help of her long-time collaborator, Jonathan Alsberry. He serves as Hubbard Street’s senior rehearsal director and artistic associate with the choreographer’s New York company, Aszure Barton & Artists.
The Alberta native and now Seattle resident first started making dances when she was a 15-year-old dance student at Toronto’s National Ballet School. But it was a commission in 2003 from Hubbard Street 2, the company’s then-apprentice group, that set her definitively on her path as a full-time choreographer. That project established an ongoing bond with the company that has climaxed with her current three-year residency.
When Linda-Denise Fisher-Harrell took over as Hubbard Street’s artistic director in March 2021, she quickly asked Barton to return to stage “Busk.” The new company leader had long admired Barton’s dreamlike 2009 work, which is set to Gypsy and choral music with the dancers in layered black costumes, including hoods at one point, and thought it would be ideal for Hubbard Street.
That collaboration went so well that Barton approached Fisher-Harrell about the possibility of a residency. The artistic director jumped at the chance. Fisher-Harrell said she recalls thinking: “Really? Am I dreaming? She wants to do a residency with us? No brainer.”
So, in 2023, Barton became the company’s first artist-in-residence in several years, a position that was supposed to end after this season but could be extended. “It’s been an incredible collaboration with her,” Fisher-Harrell said. “The dancers know her, and the second she goes, ‘Let’s change this, and let’s do that,’ they go right with her.”
For the choreographer’s part, Barton said she enjoys the nomadic lifestyle that goes with her job, but she has found that being able to build an ongoing bond with a group in this way is more satisfying. “You’re able to go deeper into the work you’re doing and build relationships,” she said. “I live on the road, so it’s great to have a sense of home when I am away from home.”