Dance : Hubbard Street Dance Chicago in Mostly Tharp Works at Royce Hall

Formed in 1977, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago became a potent touring attraction as a jazz ensemble performing feelgood pastiches of no distinction whatsoever.

However, it suddenly gained a major role in American dance when it became the custodian of modern dance choreographies that Twyla Tharp left homeless when she abandoned the idea of sustaining a permanent company or repertory.

Today Tharp prefers short-term projects such as her “Cuting Up” tour with Mikhail Baryshnikov (at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts early this month), leasing to Hubbard Street and the Boston Ballet the works that made and confirmed her reputation.

At Royce Hall, UCLA, on Saturday, Hubbard presented three of its five Tharp acquisitions, along with a familiar commission by another high-profile former Paul Taylor dancer, ISO’s Daniel Ezralow. The program seemed to please the capacity crowd of Hubbaphiles but it left some Tharpians feeling betrayed.

Take, for example, Elaine Kudo’s problematic new staging of “Nine Sinatra Songs” (1982). Some of us could accept the gowns that didn’t quite fit, the missing jokes about dancer height and the tour injury that caused one man to turn up in two different roles. But not the lack of fluidity that should have made Tharp’s most startling experiments in ballroom partnering appear weirdly natural.

The performance began disastrously with Christine Carrillo distorting for posey glamour the tender duet to “Softly as I Leave You” opposite Josef Patrick. Mannerism and miscasting continued to take their toll but at least Lynn Sheppard and Joseph Mooradian managed to salvage the gymnastic “One for My Baby.”

Although they danced skillfully, Ron de Jesus and Shan Bai muted the aggression in “That’s Life”--no shaking her like a rag doll and having her run back for more. Not in P.C. ’93.

Staged by Shelley Washington, the Hubbard version of “The Golden Section” looked obsessed with neatness. Forget the sense of daring, of dynamism, of yielding to an engulfing impulse that had once made this finale from “The Catherine Wheel” (1981) so glorious.

Welcome to a performance in which every cluster of dancers seemed to have a designated driver, in which a sense of catharsis had been subordinated to cheery self-aggrandizement.

Happily, Washington’s production of “Baker’s Dozen” (1979) offered reason for optimism. In the liquid, overlapping phases of this distinctively mellow suite, the Hubbard cast suddenly forgot the spotlight and grew younger, more casual, even playful.

The illusion of Tharpian spontaneity and camaraderie again took root and you found yourself trusting everyone on the stage, no exceptions.

If “Baker’s Dozen” suggested the mood and momentum of America before the Reagan-Bush era, a far different social portrait emerged in Ezralow’s “Super Straight Is Coming Down” from10 years later. Here, in a context of no-escape isolation, Ezralow developed a tense, spasmodic virtuosity to depict a group’s attempts at surviving waves of brutalization.

Patrick Mullaney led a committed performance of this bracing, feel bad Hubbard specialty.