Hubbard Street Returns With Touch of Twyla Tharp : Dance: The choreographer has been working with the Chicago-based troupe for two years. Two of the four works on the program are hers.

Since 1979, Hubbard Street Dance Company has progressed from dancing in senior citizen cafeterias in Chicago to dancing the works of renowned choreographer Twyla Tharp on tour in Europe and the United States.

The Chicago-based troupe performs theatrical jazz, modern dance and classical ballet, and calls itself a category-defying company, mixing muscular energy and wit. Its appearance in San Diego two years ago was a sellout.

Hubbard Street will perform nightly at the Spreckels Theatre tonight through Sunday, presented by the San Diego Foundation for the Performing Arts. Of the four dances on the program, which repeats each night, two are signature works by New York-based choreographer Twyla Tharp, with whom the company has been working for the past two years.

Lou Conte, artistic director for the 17-member company, sought to explain Hubbard’s unique character in a telephone interview from Palo Alto, where the company was performing last week before heading to Malibu and San Diego.

Its “Midwestern stamp” attracted Tharp, he believes, an appeal that resulted in the Tharp Project, a three-year collaboration, in which Hubbard Street, in phases, is adding a series of her works to its eclectic repertoire.

“When I try to say what that (Midwestern aspect) is, it usually comes out wrong,” Conte said, laughing, but he attempted a description, nonetheless. “Hubbard Street is not pretentious. It has a hard-working, go-for-it attitude. We’re not afraid to look like we’re working hard to please you. It’s not naivete, but a clean-cut, conservative flavor.”

Conte says his company is high-energy, focused and “does not try to push people’s buttons.” These non-experimental, non-controversial qualities seem to reflect Conte’s own dance background--years of choreographing for numerous chorus line Broadway musicals, and dancing in such hits as “Cabaret” and “Mame.”

“Twyla was looking for a company that could do some of the works, the smaller works of hers, that (American) Ballet Theater wasn’t doing,” Conte said.

(Tharp disbanded her own company in 1988 to devote more time to creating dances, rather than to raising money and administration. Last week, Twyla Tharp and Dancers, a pickup company of dancers on loan from Paris Opera Ballet and the New York City Ballet, among others, performed new and old Tharp pieces to critical praise at the New York City Center.)

“In the summer of ’89 she saw us at the Ravinia Festival (the summer arts festival outside Chicago) and negotiations followed” to launch the collaborative project, Conte said. By contract agreement, Hubbard has become a physical archive--much like a living dance library--for some of Tharp’s well-known works.

Hubbard Street currently is the only ongoing modern dance company learning Tharp’s techniques and her philosophy of movement from Tharp herself and from three of her trusted instructors, all of whom work with the troupe as new dances are added to the repertoire.

In an interview with The Times last year, longtime Hubbard dancer Claire Bataille commented on these teaching sessions: Tharp is “very demanding but she’s not demeaning at all. Her work ethics are so pure--it was all about the work and accomplishing something. . . . I think (the Tharp pieces) have a kind of accessibility that’s always been a feature of Hubbard Street works. . . . They give the dancers a lot of satisfaction, which tends to give the audience a lot of satisfaction.”

In the summer of 1990, Hubbard danced its first Tharp works, performing “Sue’s Leg” and “The Fugue” at Jacob’s Pillow, the prestigious dance festival in the Massachusetts Berkshires. “Baker’s Dozen” was added in 1991, and now the company is presenting “The Golden Section.” These latter two works are on the San Diego program.

“The Golden Section” is the 15-minute final segment of Tharp’s 80-minute poetic fantasy “The Catherine Wheel,” with music scored by David Byrne. Critic Arlene Croce called “The Golden Section” a “dance apotheosis of astonishing beauty and power” at its 1981 premiere, adding that it reaches “supersonic speeds as it passes from one prodigious episode to the next.”

Tharp, whose work Conte characterized as cerebral, mathematical and schematic in its imagery, is the most recent choreographer to “stretch” the Hubbard Street dancers. Others whose work the company has featured include David Parsons, Richard Levi, Bill Cratty, Mary Ward, Bob Fosse and Conte himself. Like Tharp’s, these choreographers’ movement styles are based in classical ballet, though the differences among them range from high-kicking jazz dances to lyrical modern works.

Besides Tharp, dances by Margo Sappington and Daniel Ezralow are represented on this weekend’s program. Ezralow, a dancer and choreographer for Pilobolus and Momix--two companies noted for their witty and abstract contortions of the body for visual effect--created “Super Straight Is Coming Down” for Hubbard in 1989, which was performed by the company in San Diego that year.

Unlike the 1989 concert, “Super Straight” will open this weekend’s program. Jarring, with images recalling New York artist Robert Longo’s paintings of urban professionals seemingly blasted by some violent invisible force, “Super Straight” does not reinforce the “bright, happy, cheery dancing” Conte says generally is associated with Hubbard. Critics have agreed, praising the serious and enigmatic dance as a favorable departure from the company’s carefree image.

“Audiences who have seen us don’t expect something like that,” Conte said, “and audiences who don’t know Hubbard Street might think the whole evening is going to be . . .” Conte searched for a word--” . . . stark.”

“I like the surprise of it, the idea of changing people’s perceptions of the company,” he said. “And it’s followed by Tharp’s ‘Baker’s Dozen,’ which is in white (and is) pretty, flowing and light--F. Scott Fitzgeraldy.”

Sappington’s dance is set to a series of four tangos by Astor Piazzolla. “Cobras in the Moonlight” is about the loss of the feminine principle, Conte said. Through the progression of tangos, the stereotypical idea of what is feminine is challenged.

“What makes this piece good, though, is the wonderful partnering and the dynamics of it,” Conte said. “It looks good, whether or not people pick up on the story line.”

After the company tour, the dancers will return to Chicago and work on the next phase of the Tharp Project--Tharp’s popular “Nine Sinatra Songs”--for performance in the fall of 1992. The pieces have gotten bigger and more famous, Conte said. “I’m hoping that the third phase of this project will be original works by Twyla for our company . . . “

“Each year we mature a little bit and get better. But I’m not very objective about that,” Conte said with a laugh. “Twyla has made the company better, and an opportunity like that can’t happen too often because there aren’t that many Twylas around.”

Hubbard Street Dance Company performs at the Spreckels Theatre today, Saturday and Sunday at 8 p.m. Tickets, from $10 to $35, are available at all TicketMaster outlets or by calling 278-TIXS.