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The heat is on: sleek, edgy, intensely cool-Hubbard Street has morphed into an eclectic mix of sizzling energy.

Article Excerpt
FOR CHERYL MANN, IT WAS A TYPICAL NIGHT OF PERFORMING with Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. Things got off to a rousing start with Daniel Ezralow's SF/LB, a burst of perpetual motion and tricky counterpoint set to a jazzy Leonard Bernstein score. Then came the world premiere of Lar Lubovitch's Love Stories, in which Mann had a searingly sexy duet--all body heat and spectacular lifts. After intermission, she launched into yet another taxing work that required a totally different approach--Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin's emotionally imploding Tabula Rasa. In the final work, counter/part, she was performing the sometimes breakneck choreography of her boss, Jim Vincent, artistic director of HSDC.

"I've danced programs like that many times," says Mann, laughing, but clearly remembering the exhaustion she felt after HSDC's three-week spring season at the Joan W. and Irvine B. Harris Theater for Music and Dance, its home base in the city's new high-profile Millennium Park. "But it also sometimes works out that I only dance one or two pieces the next night," she says.

Yet it is that extraordinary stamina, and that ability to shift quickly and convincingly from style to style, that has become the trademark of Hubbard Street's dancers.

For the better part of two decades, the company, now in its 28th year, has undergone a carefully calibrated artistic evolution that has caught the attention of dancers, choreographers, audiences, and presenters. What began in the 1970s as founder Lou Conte's jazzy little troupe of performers with impeccable technique and memorable stage personalities has morphed into...