Living Art: Hubbard Street Pro's Immersive Performance at the Logan Center
Images courtesy of Rachel Aka and Peter Hinsdale.
By Ellen Wiese
In early March, Hubbard Street Pro (HS Pro) collaborated with the Logan Center and the Dance Program in Theater and Performance Studies (TAPS) to present moving installations a stairway and a corridor, a site-specific performance that stretched from the ninth floor to the courtyard. As indicated by the title, the performance largely took place throughout the northern stairwell and the second-floor corridor, as well as the Logan courtyard. Led through the performance in groups of ten, audience members followed the piece’s winding imagery, standing feet away from dancers as they utilized the steps, windows, levels, and railings of the stairwell as elements of the performance. The piece culminated on the second floor, where audience members overlooked dancers in the courtyard accompanied by live electronic music.
Utilizing elements from architecture to wearable art to music, the experience constructed a complete sensory world within the Logan Center. The spaces the artists occupied vibrated with energy, charged by choreography that was simultaneously expansive and intimate. Using the architecture of the building to full effect, the work represented the potential of site-specific work in Logan, showcasing a collaboration that was complex, multi-disciplinary, and ultimately breathtaking.
Image courtesy of Rachel Aka.
The Hubbard Street Professional Program, or HS Pro, works to provide diverse training to dancers looking to enter the current job market. Affiliated with Hubbard Street, one of the most prestigious contemporary dance companies in the world, HS Pro includes a diverse array of students, from those who have just graduated from high school or college to those taking a gap year from the profession to further train and investigate their craft.
The mission of HS Pro requires constant adaptation to changes in the field of dance. Alexandra Wells, Director of Artist Training and the force behind HS Pro, shapes the program with these currents in mind. “It really has become very apparent to me that dancers—a part of their training needs to be non-proscenium performance art,” Wells says. “More and more it’s demanded of a young artist that they will be doing installation work, they will be doing immersive work, they will be performing in museums, and on staircases and in open plazas in the middle of town or on a riverbank. This is becoming more and more part of their world, and five years from now, every company will include this.”
“More and more it’s demanded of a young artist that they will be doing installation work, they will be doing immersive work, they will be performing in museums, and on staircases and in open plazas in the middle of town or on a riverbank.”
Alexandra Wells, Director of Artist Training at Hubbard Street
The companies that used to focus on tours and proscenium stages, Wells says, are increasingly focusing on outreach and site-specific work as the touring market has dried up. Dance organizations are finding alternative venues and affordable collaborations with different groups. In this market, Wells notes, “it’s very important to include [site-specific work] in a dancer’s education. And Hubbard Street Pro’s mission is to prepare dancers for their careers.”
HS Pro’s focus on site-specific work led Wells to reach out to Julia Rhoads, Director of Dance for TAPS at UChicago and Artistic Director of Lucky Plush Productions (check out their Virtual Dance Lab, currently offering dance and movement classes to the University community and beyond). A component of the TAPS Dance Program’s mission is advancing cross-disciplinary practice and scholarship, and Rhoads saw this partnership with HS Pro as a perfect opportunity to showcase these goals. According to Rhoads, “with the multidisciplinary nature of the building and the artists it houses, Logan is a perfect place to activate a dynamic conversation between dance and its primary disciplinary partners through unexpected site-based work.”
Leigh Fagin, Senior Director of Programming and Engagement at the Logan Center, is working to make initiatives like moving installations an integral part of the operation of the building. “The fact that this performance is dance, music, and visual arts is something the Logan Center is primed to make possible—it’s an opportunity for students and audiences to explore the building and see it in new ways,” Fagin says. “It provides opportunities for artists to work in a space like ours that’s living and breathing all day and night with students making art and audiences attending events.”
Image courtesy of Rachel Aka.
The dancers of HS Pro were featured in original creations by choreographers Jenna Pollack, who collaborated with visual artist E.LEE, and Robyn Mineko Williams, who collaborated with musician, composer, and designer of wearable art Melina Ausikaitis. In addition to the performances, Rhoads led an open panel discussion with the artists about their process of creating works specifically for the Logan Center. Williams and Pollack also taught masterclasses for UChicago students through the TAPS Dance Program and were guest artists in Rhoads’s Contemporary Dance Techniques course. After attending the performance, one of the students in the course observed: “Going through moving installations was a literary one-of-a-kind experience… I don’t think I can ever walk through [Logan] again without thinking about the performance. […] For a few hours, the performers transformed the building into a living piece of art.”
For moving installations, these artists were tasked with generating, staging, and rehearsing the works in a location very much in use, from students traveling between classes to audiences attending evening events. This is a significant challenge for any site-specific work, but it’s also an opportunity. As Wells notes, “It’s not only an immersive performance—the entire experience [is] immersive. The dancers [...] need to be flexible. [...] It’s constantly created within a public space. It’s not that we had private moments to create something that then becomes public—the full experience [is] public.”
During the week of rehearsals at Logan, the usually quiet north stairwell echoed with sound: instructions, conversation, laughter, the rattle of metal coins and chains. Clusters of dancers in costumes ranging from all-white dresses to gray streetwear occupied each floor, stepping aside and politely greeting people who came through, then resuming where they left off when the stairs were clear. Visiting rehearsal, I felt like I had stepped into a precious moment, witnessing the artists shape the space into a living, connected organism.
“I don’t think I can ever walk through [Logan] again without thinking about the performance. For a few hours, the performers transformed the building into a living piece of art.”
The space—complete with its idiosyncrasies of architecture and foot traffic—is a crucial character in any site-specific work. Rehearsing somewhere that’s in use for other purposes is not just a necessity, but an advantage; Wells encouraged students and faculty to visit the space during rehearsals. As she states, “A lot of what’s important to site-specific work is how it interacts with the public, what happens to the space and what happens to the dancers and how [they] react when there are people in the space.”
The HS Pro ensemble transformed the Logan Center into more than just a stage: it was a part of the performance, shaping interactions that couldn’t have taken place anywhere else. moving installations a stairway and a corridor is a testament to the skill of the artists involved, the HS Pro program, and the potential of the Logan Center as a cross-disciplinary center for innovative art—and hopefully just one of many collaborations to come.
Watch the stairwell component of the piece, “In the Red,” created by Jenna Pollack and E.LEE (video courtesy of Benjamin Hood):
And excerpts from the portion of the piece that took place in the corridor and courtyard, created by Robyn Mineko Williams and Melina Ausikaitis (video courtesy of Peter Hinsdale):
