Review: Bad Bunny, jazz and funk fuel groovy Southern Theater performance

A rousing new dance set to Bad Bunny’s hit “Nuevayol” is part of Rhythmically Speaking’s jazzy summer production.

The Twin Cities dance company’s “Groovers & Makers 2025: 4 Takes on Jazz Dance” highlights four choreographers and features two premieres. Focused on jazz and American social dance forms, the show moves from lindy hop to Latin jazz to message-driven contemporary works.

Artistic and executive director Erinn Liebhard begins with her 2024 piece, “Confronting Consonance,” exploring symmetry through parallel lines and pairs of dancers facing off.

As dancers slide their feet with each step while not moving forward, as if skating in place, a growing sense of futility envelops them. Moving through fight stances and film noir moodiness, the choreography opens up to spiraling patterns. Trust begins to grow between the dancers, and soon they are lifting each other up into the air.

Accompanying the piece are recordings by Ethiopian jazz musician Mulatu Astatke and the Tel Aviv-based Afro-Funk band the Hoodna Orchestra, plus music by British band the Heliocentrics and American jazz musician Aaron Parks. The improvisation in Liebhard’s choreography would be even better with a live band instead of recordings.

Minnesota choreographer Hannah MacKenzie-Margulies sources recordings from groups she knows personally in the second work, “All Skate,” a premiere.

The dancers seem like they are having fun as they flick their feet, twist their torsos and kick their heels — both with partners and as a whole group, often in a circle. MacKenzie-Margulies frames the work within a dance competition.

In Cynthia Gutierrez’s premiere of “ICE age,” (referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement) the Washington-based choreographer sets dance first to the cross-genre music group Timoneki and later to Bad Bunny’s “Nuevayol.” The Puerto Rican rapper’s song — the title is Puerto Rican slang for New York — meditates on the immigrant experience in NYC, while Gutierrez centers on the image of the immigrant farm worker.

Wearing red bandanas — first tied around their faces and later hung around their necks and used as props — the dancers embody exaggerated visual language. At first it’s laborious farm work and stealthy border-crossing scenes. Later there are gun-slinging, barn dancing and protest gestures, while accompanying video acts in dialogue with the movement. Bad Bunny’s reggaeton beat adds a compelling rhythm, and Gutierrez crafts the catchy music into a politically driven work.

The program wraps up with “Shakedown,” Texas-based Brandi Coleman’s 2023 piece about dancers losing their constricting work suits and the confines of society with them. There’s not a whole lot of subtlety in the concept. Instead Coleman goes for a joyful release, fueled by rhythm and danced beautifully by the ensemble.

Groovers & Makers 2025: 4 Takes on Jazz Dance

When: 7:30 p.m. Fri., 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Sat.