DANCE REVIEW : Troupe’s Talents Mesh With Tharp’s : Performance: Presentation at Spreckels Theatre gives dancers, audience plenty of quirky fun.

Internationally famous choreographer Twyla Tharp creates dance, or rather Dance, that is a pleasure to witness. Her inventive, unflagging mesh of past popular dance, high dance art, and an assortment of quirky movements from non-dance sources has profoundly influenced contemporary dance.

Hubbard Street Dance Company gave the audiences at Spreckels Theater this weekend the pleasure of seeing Tharp’s works well-performed. In a collaborative effort between Tharp and and the Chicago-based Hubbard Street, several of her dances are being added to Hubbard’s repertoire. Judging by the performance Saturday, the relationship is completely compatible.

The two Tharp works on the program, “Baker’s Dozen” and “The Golden Section,” were playful and intellectually unchallenging, but anything but shallow. They are dances about dance, and make no pretense to be about much else.

“Baker’s Dozen” is a clever and elegant nod to ballroom dancing and jazz dance, and has numerous social dance references. (In many ways it is a prelude to Tharp’s hit, “Nine Sinatra Songs,” which Hubbard is adding to its repertoire this fall.)

To the piano music of Willie Smith, 12 dancers breeze on and off the stage, in couples, trios, and a variety of ensembles. Their sequences, though as divergent as toggling-head silliness to sweeping romantic cotillion-style gestures, are strung together without artistic lapses.

Humorous, almost cute, at times, this dance appears made for Hubbard, even if it wasn’t originally.

Solos and ensembles briskly rendered made up “The Golden Section,” the final section of Tharp’s larger dance drama, “The Catherine Wheel.”

Before a sparkling gold backdrop curtain and in gold costumes--a sassy garishness that matched David Byrne’s score--dancers took the stage, flying to and from the wings in a variety of attitudes, mostly of the fun-loving sort. They danced, but also jogged backward, shimmied their shoulders, shadowboxed, played air guitar, built ungainly architectural constructions with their bodies, spun as if on ice skates, skidded, ran and lunged. Tharp’s quirks always seem to work, never drooping under the weight of self-indulgence.

Much of the dance action hugged the wings, when dancers weren’t appearing or disappearing there. Dancers even “dropped in” from the wings, thrown onstage into the arms of unsuspecting partners, in a “here, catch!” recklessness.

In the final image, a soloist (Clair Bataille) lunged stage left as the lights went out. Her leg, extended behind her, was still in view onstage, caught in mid-action, as if to say this dance never ends.

“The Golden Section” has an ever-buoyant childlike quality, a let-loose esprit . Yet, there are no loose ends. Tharp has unwavering control of the composition, and her exceptional crafting of the energy flow gives this work its power.

Hubbard Street danced it with confidence, but without the nonchalance one associates with Tharp. This work is virtuosic, requiring accuracy and precision, even though it tries to look casual. Certainly the company has the Twyla Tharp “pluck” and capably executed the complexities of this dance, but they looked better, freer, in “Baker’s Dozen.”

Tharp’s dance ideas would easily overpower most choreography juxtaposed on the same program, and in this respect, Hubbard’s artistic director, Lou Conte, had a tricky task. He chose two recent works with high-drama appeal by contemporary choreographers to alternate with the Tharp pieces. Neither dance was the masterwork of Tharp, but both held up well, mostly because of the high technical quality of the performers.

Choreographer Margo Sappington, in “Cobras in the Moonlight,” takes a reflexive glance at dance traditions, like Tharp, but Sappington also comments on sexuality. An epigraphic program note implies that the work is about the female essence in the male, and vice versa, as in Jungian psychology. However, despite a melodramatic overtone, “Cobras” is a conventional look at conventional attitudes on sexuality.

Through a series of tangos, the sexy, serpentine female archetype, in her flesh-revealing black dress, slithers around her generic male partner and progresses to a stern-faced female in man’s suit and hat, dancing “like a man” with a male counterpart in matching costume.

Taken as presented, this is a reactionary statement on the role women take in a “man’s world.”

Another program note states, “These four tangos represent a journey toward the loss of the anima . . . the feminine principle.” Sappington’s anima--female as crotch-hugging seductress--is nothing to save.

Nevertheless, the dancing by the Hubbard Street crew was fine, particularly that of Daniela Panessa, and the choreography and staging rarely lagged.

“Super Straight Is Coming Down,” by Daniel Ezralow, was another highly dramatic statement on gender roles. Five dancers emerged from transparent closet bags, dressed as the Western World status quo quintet--three men (Frank Chaves, Ron de Jesus, Michael McGowan) in the white shirt and necktie uniform, one woman in a little black go-to-the-clubs dress, and another in nondescript blouse and skirt (Amy Nicole Heggins and Adrienne Parker). All are stereotypically identified by their clothes--the males as Wall Street yuppie warriors; the females, as virgin and whore.

Danced to the expansive and jarring electronic score of Tom Willems, the work rails at the trap of these roles. Dancers jerk and gyrate, propelled and blasted by outside forces. They are skipping automatons; life is regimented. There is no transcendence. Their Angst is futile.