Dance Review

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago

Presented by the Celebrity Series of Boston. At: Citi Shubert Theatre, April 15. Remaining performance: April 17. Tickets: $35-$75. 866-348-9738, .celebrityseries.org

Now in its 38th season, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago has expanded its repertoire from the jazz-based choreography of founding director Lou Conte to encompass the likes of Twyla Tharp, Bob Fosse, Nacho Duato, Jirí Kylián, Robert Battle, Ohad Naharin, Trey McIntyre, Lar Lubovitch, and William Forsythe. For its Celebrity Series weekend at the Shubert Theatre, the company, under artistic director Glenn Edgerton, brought a mixed program that showed it moving in a good direction.

Hubbard Street dancer Penny Saunders’ “Out of Keeping’’ (2015), which she created for the company, was the odd work out. To a piano-and-strings score drawn from albums by Hilary Hahn and Hauschka, Karsten Gundermann, Danny Norbury, and Ólafur Arnalds, five men and five women, in color-coordinated outfits, move as couples, or by gender, or independently. The choreography is attractive but hardly novel, and neither it nor the music reaches any discernible destination. The highlight Friday was the fourth of the five sections, a knotty duet for Kellie Epperheimer and Jeffery Duffy.

Forsythe’s “N.N.N.N.’’ (2002) is altogether more intense. Thom Willems’s score amplifies the sometimes heavy breathing of the two men and two women and mixes it with the merest hints of music. The quotidian, often comic movement is all action and reaction, but never predictable; the dancers look like a Rubik’s cube trying to solve itself. Forsythe has an uncanny feel for the space between dancers; this quartet always seemed a single organism, even though it was rare that any two of them were doing the same thing.

Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite, who danced with Forsythe’s Ballett Frankfurt, created two versions of “A Picture of You Falling’’ in 2008: one for a couple, which found its way into her 2010 piece “The You Show,’’ and the six-minute solo edition Hubbard Street presented at the Shubert. The industrial score by electronic composer Owen Belton is complemented by a voiceover from British actress Kate Strong: “Look, this is you. This is a picture of you falling.’’ Jason Hortin had the perfect body language for Belton’s junkyard whacks, thumps, and crashes, right down to the way he’d jack himself up after yet another fall.

Created for Nederlands Dans Theater in 2012, and set to the Allegro non troppo from Brahms’s First Cello Sonata and the Adagio affettuoso from his Second, Pite’s “Solo Echo’’ was inspired by Mark Strand’s “Lines for Winter.’’ Against a background of falling snow, seven dancers in khaki green — echoes of one character, according to Pite — gradually formed a unit, and when one dancer broke away, the others gathered him or her up. Six melted away at the end as the seventh fell, but by then Pite had earned the final lines of Strand’s poem: “tell yourself / in that final flowing of cold through your limbs / that you love what you are.’’

Jeffrey Gantz can be reached at jeffreymgantz@gmail.com