DANCE REVIEW : HUBBARD COMPANY AT ROYCE HALL

The aftermath of “Tango Argentino” has included some ridiculous tributes--among them TV commercials using tango dancers to sell everything from pantyhose to chewing gum. Nothing, however, has been more deliriously all-consuming in its wrongheaded devotion than “Cobras in the Moonlight,” Margo Sappington’s new 23-minute showpiece for Hubbard Street Dance Company.

In a way, Sappington and Hubbard Street were made for each other. Best known for her nude “Oh! Calcutta!” choreography, Sappington has always been quick to repackage fads as pop dance--and, from early in its eight-year history, the Chicago-based pop ballet company that took Hubbard Street as its name (from its original address) has welcomed flashy genre pieces, however bogus.

Thus the local premiere of “Cobras,” Friday night in Royce Hall, UCLA (on an otherwise familiar Hubbard Street program), had a supply-and-demand inevitability parallel to the weight of destiny expressed in tango culture. Sappington and Hubbard, “Argentino” and American ballet: the mix just had to be (in the words of one TV tango ad) fat with flavor, right?

Not entirely--though Sappington obviously did her homework. Beyond appropriating the lunging footwork and bold partnering ploys in “Tango Argentino” (fair game, since the show didn’t invent them), she seized upon its notable implication-of-structure-though-contrast and its stark theatrical style: the spotlit glare-against-black effect.

She even formed her theme (“a journey towards the loss of the anima . . . the feminine principle,” according to the program note) out of tantalizing moments of sex-role ambiguity in the show: those men dancing with each other at the beginning and the steamy duet for women in the dance-drama.

Her major departure came in Sappington’s progression from a hot-but-formal union of tango stereotypes (self-absorbed male, remote female) in the opening duet through a brief, fluid menage a trois (men sharing a woman and one another) to a final reversal of partnering conventions--with both male and female equally macho in double-breasted suits. Accompanying the shift: a scenic transformation from a smoky open stage to a tighter wings-and-scrim focus.

Unfortunately, Sappington’s arbitrary action plan proved unconvincing (it takes more than male apparel and hauteur to nullify the feminine principle) and no substitute for the integrity, the tango- instinct , that neither she nor her Hubbard dancers could supply.

Just as her intricate, reprocessed step-sequences never linked up in intelligible phrases, all the cast’s de rigueur pseudo-Latino sexual intensity seemed wildly forced, if not faked. The use of atmospheric recorded music by Astor Piazzola only made the feeling of fatal cultural dislocation more acute.

This failure proved historic, if only because up to Friday the dancing on Hubbard Street programs had almost always been beyond criticism--just as the choreography had almost always been beneath it. But here, for once, that infallible flyweight gamin, Kitty Skillman; that spiked-hair dynamo, Ginger Farley; and that highly sure of himself (with reason) street-cavalier, Carlton Wilborn, among others, looked very far from home.

But don’t cry for them, “Argentino”: They had their innings. All three danced with great verve and control (with Farley especially sharp) in Claire Bataille’s “Full Moon,” a large-scale trivialization of Aaron Copland’s piano concerto.

In Bataille’s flat jazz etude “Three-Part Invention,” Wilborn snapped off spectacular air turns with contemptuous ease. And in Lou Conte’s innocuous exercise in nostalgia, “The ‘40s,” Skillman led the company in a demonstration of state-of-the-art unison dancing.

Conte’s bluesy trio “Party Music” and the splashy Conte/Bataille group piece, “Line Drive” completed the program, each performed with the sweet, easy proficiency that makes the Hubbard Street company so endearing--even when serving what amounts to the dance equivalent of junk food.

Whatever he may ignore about the art of choreography, company director Conte is a brilliant teacher who understands how fine dancing focuses audience perception--how with perfect unisons you multiply the effectiveness of any step by the number of participants. (With sloppy unisons, you divide .) This may not be a profound truth, but in a season of bedraggled “Nutcracker” dancing, it is welcome indeed.