DANCE REVIEW : Hubbard Street Adds <i> Angst</i> to Its Repertory

Cute, zany, entertaining--and, with its typically “Pink Panther” choreography on tap, the Hubbard Street Dance Company came across exactly as intended Tuesday at the Smothers Theatre, Pepperdine University: as marketers of slinky bravura with a consuming desire to please crowds.

While supple bodies and extroversion were de rigueur for the familiar disco-jazz routines inspired by artistic director Lou Conte, not all the dancers could deliver the ultimate panache needed--a point understandably ignored by an audience seized with the sheer physicality of tightly controlled, rhythmic routines.

But the Chicagoans, now in their 11th year, had greater success with the program’s newer works, journeys into the nihilism of serious contemporary dance that demanded less virtuosity.

Margo Sappington’s 1987 “Step Out of Love,” for instance, set a quintet of women, suffering a kind of street-corner nervousness, against a hard-rock score. Distinctly in an MTV vein, the piece is made of flimsy stuff--little more than jerks and spasms, slides and grinds, flailings and spinnings. Packaged as a smoky subterranean excursion, though, it has the easy appeal that is the company’s trademark.

Daniel Ezralow’s 1989 “Super Straight,” on the other hand, stepped somewhat away from this standard. With its ear-battering industrial noise (a score by Tom Willems, William Forsythe’s favorite composer), its dancers in street wear and its material a series of somnolent struts, floor writhings, and confrontational stances, a true sense of urban Angst emerged.

Even this, however, evolved into unison maneuvers--thereby bearing the Hubbard Street seal. Couched among such favorites as the “Tango Argentino”-inspired “Cobras” and the big-band swing number, “The ‘40s,” it did little to detract from the main show-biz thrust. And that’s OK too.