Hubbard ensemble deftly expresses liberation, love

From an audience-courting jazz-dance ensemble notable mostly for sleek technique, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago has evolved over the last 28 years into a modern-dance repertory company second only to the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in choreographic range and interpretive depth.

Popular music remained central to its four-part program Sunday at the Alex Theatre in Glendale, but each choreographer explored a distinctive vocabulary in pieces ranging in mood from mindlessly soothing to provocatively abrasive.

Using a suite of Rolling Stones hits, Christopher Bruce’s familiar “Rooster” (1991) drew steps, gestures and quasi-narrative action-plans from the song lyrics, emphasizing the sexual aggression fueling “Paint It Black,” “Play With Fire” and other Stones staples.

The oldest piece on the bill -- and the only import -- it culminated in a powerful full-cast ensemble to “Sympathy for the Devil” that skillfully recapped previous motifs but drew its force from waves of energy surging around the tireless Tobin Del Cuore.

Charlaine Katsuyoshi embodied angelic sweetness as Ruby Tuesday and Jamy Meek ultimate degradation in “Paint it Black.” The coltish, versatile Meek also danced with fabulous freedom in eccentric solos that proved the only novel components of “Love Stories,” Lar Lubovitch’s plotless, formulaic showpiece to recordings by jazz singer Kurt Elling.

Billed as “a new work in preview,” the suite might as easily have been titled “Lift Stories,” since it functioned primarily as an empty-hearted partnering lab, using varied emotions as pretexts for swoony nonstop gymnastics. A song may be about desire, but Lubovitch put no such feeling in the movement -- only muscularity.

Such Hubbard paragons as Erin Derstine, Hope Muir, Yarden Ronen, Robyn Williams and Martin Lindinger smoothly executed the complex, slo-mo partnering challenges, but Lubovitch went over the top so often in pursuit of athleticism that he really needed a radical revision of the ballads that accompanied the dancing. Something like “Every time you crush my spine, I cry a little....” Or, “They asked me how I knew you were black and blue.... “

Happily, Lucas Crandall offered a sharper look at relationships in his clever, rawboned 2004 duet “Gimme,” to music by the Swedish mountain group Bla Bergens Borduner.

With every footfall loudly amplified by their boots, Cheryl Mann and Del Cuore depicted a feisty, unresolved power struggle in which a long cord (not really thick enough to be a rope) became a symbol of the tie that binds.

Pulling at the cord like a leash, wrapping it around each other, stealing it, letting it go and ultimately reconnecting through it, they used the cord to shape shifting patterns of dominance and intimacy.

In the end, they nibbled on opposite ends as if it were a single strand of spaghetti, growing ever closer in an image famous from the 1955 Disney feature “Lady and the Tramp.”

One of the first outside choreographers to work with Hubbard was Daniel Ezralow, an iconoclast who always enjoys shaking up the kind of people he calls superstraights. A typically engulfing 2004 example of this impulse, his “SF / LB” put seven men and seven women in business suits, hopping in place to mercurial orchestral jazz by Leonard Bernstein.

Almost immediately, Ezralow varied and then shattered the uniformity, setting weird arm swoops and a kind of urban hula against the hopping, then adding spectacular turns that spiraled down to the floor and up again. Before long, coats and ties disappeared, shirts were opened, and everyone flew through jump after jump, liberated in body and soul.

This feeling of liberation, of course, is exactly what audiences have always wanted from Hubbard, and what makes them cheer when they get it. It might be fun to see the piece with a larger company that could cast it with all men or all women -- on Sunday, the male-female partnering turned out to be the only predictable thing about it. But it’s hard to imagine any troupe that could perform it with greater love for what it expresses about the transformative power of dancing.